


If Being Afraid Is a Crime, We Hang Side by Side

by iamocelost



Category: Monster Prom (Visual Novel)
Genre: Anger Management, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Original Character(s), Past Abuse, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Self-Esteem Issues, Slow Burn, Stan and Lucien are good dads
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:55:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 40,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24114616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamocelost/pseuds/iamocelost
Summary: After her mom abandons her to live to in a backwater mortal realm, Abby has a lot of pent up anger. Fortunately for her, Damien has a number of unhealthy coping mechanism up his sleeve.
Relationships: Blue | Vicky/Scott Howl, Damien LaVey/Original Character(s), Liam de Lioncourt/Yellow | Oz, Polly Geist/Green | Brian, Vera Oberlin/Red | Amira
Comments: 44
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> While the main focus is Damien/OC, this story takes a look at several relationships. I've tagged characters that have sections in their POV, but never fear, the gang's all here.
> 
> The title is taken from The Replacements' "Swingin' Party." The Lorde cover is also rad.

A bell rang somewhere, but you wouldn’t know it from the reactions of the monster in the Spooky High School parking lot. You’d expect the lackadasical attitude from the students, but Abby was fairly certain the vampire lady with the huge box of anatomical models was a teacher, and she had no qualms about continuing to smoke her joint while perched on the hood of her hearse. Abby had heard the jokes about the superiority of the Scandinavian education system, but she’d fully expected to have to at least set foot inside the building before having all her assumptions about the dumpster fire that was an American high school confirmed.

But no. There was a literal dumpster fire happening next to the gym, and no one seemed the least bit concerned.

And the manical-looking one-horned demon who had started it least of all.

No, Abby corrected herself. The high-out-of-her-mind ghost watching the fire with him definitely cared the least, since she wasn’t even bothering to cheer the raging inferno on, just watching it with a glassy look and slack jaw.

She definitely started caring with a huge werebear in a ragged blue janitor’s uniform burst through the doors of the main building, roaring that this time he’d have that demon’s shiny red ass. Actually, the werebear’s appearance sent a shockwave through the gathered students, who suddenly all remembered they had places to be. Even the vampire teacher was gone when Abby turned around, though the smell of her recreational drug use remained.

She was officially never going to forgive her mom for this shit.

Wings tucked a little closer to her body — for safety, asshole, not because she was nervous — Abby followed the fleeing students into the building and headed straight for the principal’s office. An elderly harpy gave her a once-over from her perch on the front desk, then squawked, “You must be the transfer.”

Abby didn’t bother trying to cover the disgust on her face. The harpy sure as hell wasn’t and given the millenia of bad blood between valkyries and the hideous bird women, getting through this exchange without anyone losing any feather should get them both on the short list for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Abjelle Halcyon Freyjadottir,” she said evenly. “I’m supposed to meet the principal.”

It was not a question, nor was it a very subtle reminder of Abby’s inherent superiority as a demigoddess. Normally she didn’t bother with these pathetic power games, but bristling at harpies was just too ingrained at this point, and Abby needed someone to take her frustrations out on.

The harpy seemed all too used to being an easy target for young monsters’ misplaced angst and only blinked boredly before gesturing to a bench with a lazy flip of a wing. “Have a seat.”

Abby slouched in the seat, letting her messenger bag drop on the floor beside her. A few minutes later, a very large arachnid — at least as large as Sleipner — came out of a side room and approached her. “You must be Abby,” he said congenially. At least Abby had the sense that was what he had said and that he had said it congenially. It was more of a faint skittering in the back of her skull than actually hearing anything. “I’m Principal Giant Spider.” He extended a leg which Abby shook politely. “Welcome to Spooky High School.”

“Uh, thanks,” she said, reflecting on how hairy a spider’s foot was. Bristly more than hairy, she supposed. Like Hildi.

Another leg came forward, a piece of paper held in its… toes? “We’ve prepared a schedule for you, based on the transcripts your father sent us,” Principal Giant Spider continued. “And one of your year-mates has volunteered to be your guide for your first few days. She’s a fire jinn, so she should be able to address any questions you have as an elemental. Not,” he backtracked quickly, holding two legs up and flaring his pedipalps wide in what was probably supposed to be a conciliatory fashion, “not that all elementals are the same. We like to think we’re a bit more enlightened than that here at SHS. But we do want to make you feel as comfortable as possible. Ah, here she is now.”

Abby turned to see a curvy, dark-skinned jinn with a wave of fire where others would have hair. She did not look terribly enthused to be there, slinking into the office with her red leather jacket slipping off one shoulder. “Amira,” Principal Giant Spider said, “this is Abby. Abby, Amira.”

“Hey,” Amira said.

“Hey,” Abby replied.

“If you run into any trouble,” Principal Giant Spider went on — or had he stopped at all? — “don’t hesitate to let me or Mrs. Cathart know.”

Abby gave the harpy a glance. She would not be asking Mrs. Cathart for anything, thank you very much.

Once they were in the hall, Amira snatched the class list out of Abby’s hand. “Let’s see where I need to drop your ass first,” she said.

Abby glared, feathers ruffling in irritation. “How about you give me back my shit and fuck off yourself,” she answer cooly.

“No can do,” the fire elemental said. “Showing you around this place is how I’m getting out of detention this weekend, so don’t fuck this up for me.”

“Then stop being such a bitch about it,” Abby snapped back.

Amira spun around, Abby’s class list smoking in her hand. For a few long seconds, Abby was absolutely certain the other girl was going to throw a punch, and she was already dreading the phone conversation she’d have with her dad. _How was my first day? Well I may have killed one of my classmates, but I swear it was in self-defense._

Then the jinn let out a bark of laughter. “You’ve got some backbone for a water spirit,” she said.

“Okay, first of all, just because they’re usually so go-with-the-flow doesn’t mean water elementals won’t hand your ass to you,” Abby replied, not entirely appeased by Amira’s turn to friendliness. “And second, I’m only half water spirit.”

“Yeah,” Amira said aloofly, uncrumbling the slightly charred paper in her hands, “the wings are kind of a give-away on that front. Your parents got that whole bird/fish situation going on or what? Whoa, nerd alert!” Amira’s eyes widened. “Ruthless Rhetoric, AP Murder, Advanced Forbidden Languages… that’s a senior level class.”

Abby honestly had no idea how they divided up years at this school, seeing as monsters matured at such vastly different rates from each other. She’d been born around twenty years ago, but in all likelihood her dad would insist on her staying at this gods-forsaken school for another five years at least, and then she’d probably transfer to another more specialized school for another five to eight years. But instead of bringing all that up, she shrugged and said, “I’m good with languages.” Getting the AllSpeak from her mother was a serious advantage.

“Whatever, nerd,” Amira said with a roll of her eyes. “Curses II is this way.”

The jinn led her down several hallways, up a flight of stairs, and past a group of werewolves looming over a very bored-looking gorgon. “That’s Vera Oberlin,” Amira said, nodding her chin in the direction of perfectly coifed vipers and legs for days. “If you find yourself poisoned, chances are she’ll have the antidote.”

“She just carries around a bunch of antidotes?” Abby asked.

“Only for the poisons she uses,” Amira answered. The admiration was clear in her voice.

“And the werewolves?”

“Bunch of weirdo jocks. Just avoid them. Right, here’s your class. I’ve got Ruthless Rhetoric next, same as you. It’s downstairs next to the display of famous orators, so you can’t miss it.” Amira gave her another evaluating look. “Don’t die on your first day, yeah? I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go to detention if you do.” The jinn turned on her heel and stalked back the way she came, a cigarette suddenly appeared in her fingers.

The teacher paused in the middle of taking roll when Abby opened the door. “Ah!” she said in the overly enthusiastic tone of Teachers Who Want to Make a Difference everywhere. “Class, we have a new student joining us today. Abjelle Halcyon—”

“Just Abby,” she interjected before the teacher got any further on her name. It was one thing to let a featherduster harpy know she was the daughter of the goddess of love and death. It was another to let all her classmates know. After all, her mom had ditched here on the other side of the world — a pretty clear sign that Freyja was done with her youngest child.

Still, it was nice that the teacher had correctly pronounced it “Ab-ee-Yell” instead of “Ab-Gel” like she sometimes got.

“Now I trust you’ll all do what you can to make Abby feel welcome,” the teacher went on, walking toward Abby with a leather-covered textbook in an outstretched paw.

“Yes, Mrs. Pantera,” the class mumbled in unison. Except for one bright-eyed werewolf, who fairly yelled it while wagging his tail and grinning at her widely.

Abby took a vacant seat and did her best to sink into the background.

After Curses II, Abby headed downstairs as directed to find a wall lined with the corpses of Pericles, Cicero, and Winston Churchill, which meant she’d found Ruthless Rhetoric. Amira was already inside, watching the door with feigned disinterest. “So you survived Curses,” she said when Abby slipped into the seat behind her.

The valkyrie shrugged. “Mrs. Pantera is kinda… intense,” she said.

Amira snorted. “Yeah, and she’s the school’s ‘young monster development specialist,’ so everyone has to have regular meetings with her about, like, future aspirations and shit.”

Amira clammed up when the gorgon from earlier strode into the room and took what was apparently the most coveted seat in the class — right behind a huge diorama of an angry mob waving pitchforks.

After class — a long-winded explanation of the role of nostalgia in fear-mongering — Amira led Abby to the cafeteria. “I’ll introduce you to my friends,” she said half-heartedly, which was even more insulting considering she was carrying an entire extra heart in jar, but Abby didn’t actually mind that much. By now she was kind of used to people being disappointed which she was foisted upon them.

Amira’s friends had beaten them there, it seemed. An extremely cheerful monster who looked like she’d been sewn together from spare parts waved as they approached with trays of food stuffs of indeterminate origins. (Abby would definitely be packing her own lunch from now on.) “Hi,” the girl said, one shockingly white curl bouncing just a little more than the jet black curls that made up the majority of her hair. “I’m Vicky!”

“Abby,” Abby said. She very much hoped she’d never have to say her own name this many times in one day ever again.

“That’s Brian,” Amira said, gesturing toward a broad-shouldered zombie. “And this is Oz. They’re, like, nonbinary and shit, so don’t fuck up their pronouns or I’ll have to kick your ass.”

Abby nodded to the shadow form, who gave a little wave in reply before turning their attention to the jar in Amira’s hands. “For me?” they seemed to say, but seeing as they had no mouth to speak of, Abby was fairly certain it was telepathy.

“Yup,” Amira answered, sliding the organ across the table. “One heart harvest from a selkie that was scared literally to death. Enjoy.”

“So,” Vicky said, as Oz dove into their meal, “where are you from, Abby?”

“I just moved from Vanaheim, near Sweden,” Abby replied, unable to tear her eyes away from the way bits of the selkie heart were disappearing without any semblance of biting on Oz’s part. “My dad lives up in British Columbia, so this is the closest school.”

“Are you commuting?” the Frankenstein girl asked, exuding a friendliness as palpable as a weighted blanket.

Abby shook her head. “I’ve got a little apartment in town.”

“Awesome! We all live in town too, except for Oz, who lives in the shadow realm with their family, but they crash with Brian half the time anyway.”

“My family is insane,” Oz added. “Like, there’s being driven mad by the unspeakable name of Chthulu himself, and then there’s my family.” The selkie heart was almost gone at this point. “Who in their right mind,” they went on, words drifting through Abby’s head, “would think packing 28 essences of fear, panic, and anxiety into a mansion built for 16 was a good idea? My parents, that’s who.”

Abby smiled slightly. “I’ve got 83 half-sisters, so I know the feeling.”

“Sometimes I think I miss having a family,” said the zombie, Brian. “Then I hear something like that.”

“So, Abby,” Vicky interjected, not even waiting for a natural lull in conversation, “have you heard about Monster Prom yet?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Amira huffed. “Can’t you give it a rest for about the fucking prom already?”

Vicky grinned sheepishly. “I’m just so excited. Didn’t you hear that they booked Ghost in the the Drum Machine to play the after-party?”

“That’s great and all,” Oz said, idly sliding their jar from hand to hand. “But first we have to get invited to the after-party.”

“Aw c’mon!” Vicky cajoled. “You know Polly’s parties are practically open invite.”

“Yeah, but everybody’s going to know we’re crashing,” Amira pointed out, “and I refuse to go to any party where people are going to feel sorry for me.”

“So just wrangle your way into being plus-ones for people who are already invited,” Abby suggested. “I mean, having a date for prom is pretty traditional, right?”

“Right you are!” Vicky crowed.

“Why did you say that!” Amira wailed at the same time.

Brian groaned like only a zombie can.

“Vicky’s been trying to talk us into asking people to prom for weeks,” Oz explained quietly to Abby’s confused look. “But Amira and Brian are in love with two of the most popular girls in school—”

“Oy!” the jinn yelped. “What did I tell you about using that kind of language!” Her cheeks were burning as brightly as her hair.

Abby was about to apologize for bringing it up — especially when she saw Brian turning a shade of brown that seemed really unhealthy for a zombie — but before she could say anything, one of her wings was tugged harshly from behind. “What the hell?!” a sharp angry voice yelled. “They’re letting angels in here now? My dads will not be happy about this.”

Before she had a chance to think, Abby was turning around. “Hey fuckface,” she snapped, “do you see a damn halo?” She flicked her feathers out of the grip and slapped the wing in the face of the asshole who grabbed her.

She found herself facing the same lean, muscular demon who had been gracing the parking lot with pyrotechnics when she’d arrived that morning. For a moment, he looked stunned, when his face morphed into a scowl that put several of his sharp teeth on display. “Do you know who I am, bitch?” he growled.

“I know you’re the asshole who touched me without permission,” Abby shot back, surging to her feet. “So you best back the fuck up before I decide to remove your genitals with a rusty spoon.”

The cafeteria had gone quiet, but Abby was entirely focused on the demon in front of her, shifting her weight into a combat stance and preparing to drop a small blade out of the sleeve of her cardigan — she might not be in Odin's realm anymore, but she'd be dead before she'd ignore the Allfather's admonishment to never go anywhere without a weapon. The demon had begun smoking, and his eyes widened like he was completely unused to anyone talking to him like that, but before he could make a move, the principal entered the room. “Ah!” he said/thought, “you’re behaving yourself, aren’t you, Damien? I’d hate to have to give you detention for next weekend too.”

Slowly, the demon dragged his eyes away from Abby’s face. “I was just saying hello to our new student,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Is that so?” Principal Giant Spider asked, turning three of his eyes to Abby.

“Yeah,” she agreed, smirking slightly. “Damien was just making sure I know who he is.”

As Damien turned to go, a werecat at the next table said, “I think I’ve got some ointment in the shop for that sick burn.”

Abby glanced around the rest of the cafeteria, suddenly and painfully aware of being the center of attention. She sank back down into her chair, hunching her shoulders and wings in an attempt to make herself smaller.

“Holy shit, dude,” Amira breathed. “You just stood up to Damien LaVey.”

“Guy needs to learn to keep his hands to himself,” Abby muttered.

“Seriously, though, I’ve never met a water elemental with that kind of temper,” Amira went on.

“Geez, Amira,” Oz said, “elementalist much?”

“Sorry, sorry,” the fire jinn said, “but seriously! Damn!”

“My mom’s a war goddess,” Abby said quietly. “I got her temper.” She wrinkled her nose. “So what’s that guy’s deal?”

“Damien’s a prince of hell,” Oz explained. “He manages to destroy school property at least twice a week, but his dads are, you know, lords of hell, so he never gets suspended.”

“Last week, he was complaining that he couldn’t get a food fight started because no one would throw food back at him,” Brian picked up. “So he set the cafeteria on fire and wouldn’t let anyone leave until he’d thrown some food at them. He ground mashed potatoes in Vicky’s stitches.”

“Well,” Vicky added, “he also helped me sew my leg back on after I got all the potatoes out.”

Amira rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t make him any less of an asshole.”

“But he’s a hot asshole,” Vicky countered.

Oz nodded their head. “He is a hot asshole.”

“Then one of you can ask him to prom,” Amira scowled.

Oz and Vicky both turned unnatural colors at the suggestion. “A-actually,” Vicky stuttered, “I was thinking… I might want to go with Scott.”

Abby’s attention drifted as Vicky’s friends commented on her proposed date. While she didn’t really want to have to tell her dad that she’d been fighting on the first day of school, a good brawl sounded way better than just sitting around trying to cope with her sense of abandonment. The three weeks she’d spent at Halcyon Springs with her dad while they waited for her stuff to be shipped to Monstropolis had been, on the surface, pleasant, relaxing, and entirely devoid of the physical violence that had been a regular part of her day-to-day life with her sisters — which had made Abby anxious and cranky. And sure, some of her sisters had been total bitches, and sure, they were part of the reason she’d ended up on this side of the globe, but at least when one of them tugged on a wing, they knew to expect a fist in their face.

After lunch, Amira dropped Abby in front of the civics classroom. “If you see Damien again,” she warned, “just avoid him like the proverbial devil, ‘kay?”

Easier said that done. After an hour spent dividing her time between taking notes on the nuances of troll hierarchies and deep breathing intended to calm the itchy feeling under her skin, Abby left Civics to make her way to her next class based on Amira’s sketchy directions. When she got to AP Murder — and who the hell had signed her up for AP Murder? Valkyries only dealt with people after other people killed them — to find the proverbial devil sitting at the front of the class, digging into the wood of his desk with a dagger. Abby took a seat in the back, hoping to avoid his notice, but for some reason, teachers were obsessed with introducing her, like she was incapable of telling people her name herself if she wanted them to know it. Damien turned to glare at her, yellow eyes brightening with an unholy glow, before turning to ostensibly listen to Ms. Demonslayer’s lecture on the ins-and-outs of political assassinations. At the end of the class, she announced that their final project for the unit would be a presentation on a failed assassination attempt with a detailed critique of where the would-be assassin went wrong. Abby was as unhappy as the rest of the class. Nothing was worse than giving a report in front of your classmates except giving a report in front of your classmates when you were the new kid in school.

Then it was time for gym, which, to Abby’s total bemusement, seemed to just be the entire school engaged in one huge dodgeball tournament. Coach, a weretiger with an obvious history of substance abuse and/or brain trauma, decided that the polite thing to do was to appoint her as captain. When Damien eagerly volunteered to lead the opposing team, Coach grinned widely. “Angels and demons, huh? Now that’s some fearful symmetry!”

“Actually, I’m a valkyrie,” Abby said, but no one heard as her classmates lobbied Damien for a spot on his roster. As soon as the game started, Abby saw why: the demon wasn’t particularly skilled, but he was ruthless in his tactics, habitually aiming for faces. Abby’s players dwindled quickly, until it was just her and a stocky swamp goblin who had survived this long by hiding behind his taller peers. Abby had one ball in hand, but Damien’s team had the other four, including one in the hands of the prince of hell himself. His face spread in a disturbing smile, one that bared every last one of his teeth, and in unison, he and his teammates launched their rubber missiles at the goblin.

Time slowed. It was one of the lesser-known valkyrie powers, that they could slow their perception of time on the battlefield, and Abby supposed this was close enough. She weighed her options. There was no way she could get to the goblin in time to block the balls with the one in her hands, no way for her to come out a victor here. But she could perhaps take Damien LaVey down a notch…

Quick as a flash, she shot out a wing in front of her teammate, letting all four balls strike in and deflecting them upwards. It stung like a bitch — so many nerve endings around the flight feathers especially — but Abby ignored the pain to watch the balls fall, carefully plucking the one thrown by Damien out of the air. She was out… but so was he.

She was sure to give him a smirk as she stalked off the court. He gave her a death glare in return.

Sure enough, the goblin was out only seconds later, but her team seem somehow roused by her willingness to put her own body on the line for a complete stranger and came back to win the second and third matches, thereby claiming first dibs on the shower. For a minute, Abby was taken aback by the co-ed showers — the co-ed locker room had also given her pause — but people were generally inclined to keep themselves to themselves, after a little celebratory rough-housing. In any case, she made a point to be out of there before the opposing team came to claim their turn.

Advanced Forbidden Languages was a night class — logical, since so many forbidden languages couldn’t be spoken in the light of day — which meant that by the time Abby was biking home, she’d had plenty of time to get through some homework in the school library and had zero qualms about the six-pack of dark-as-a-killer-for-hire’s-mother’s-past-life beer riding safely in the basket. The bike and the fake ID had both been gifts from her dad, who severely disapproved of anything that could be construed as Puritanical drinking laws, in spite the fact that Puritanism had been a monster invention in the first place. (You think humans could come up with something as cruel as predestination on their own?)

The bike had actually been a point of contention. Initially, Halcyon had looked into getting her a chariot and a pair of giant cats like her mothers, and it had taken everything in Abby’s power to convince him that it simply wasn’t done anymore except by shameless social climbers and the extremely uncool. Then he’d proposed covering the stabling cost for a warhorse, and she actually had pulled out charts showing him that the number of bicycles vastly outstripped the number of horses in Folkvangr before he finally agreed. “It just seems so mundane,” he’d said, lips twisted in a sad smile. “You deserve something special.”

“Maybe we can negotiate about a really rad hybrid down the road,” she’d told him with a cheeky smile, but she knew the truth: she didn’t deserve anything special. Her mom had eighty-four illegitimate daughters and she was only the third to be sent to live with their father. She didn’t actually know how many kids her dad had, but everybody knew that hot springs were basically the booty calls of water elementals and he had definitely sown some wild seaweed in his day.

She’d been given pretty strict instructions to call Halcyon as soon as she got home, which she dutifully did, phone perched between ear and shoulder as she slid a frozen pizza into her tiny oven.

“Hej!” he answered her enthusiastically. “Hur mår du?” He had exhausted about a quarter of his Swedish vocabulary with the greeting, but it was sweet that he tried.

“Fine,” she said, popping the top on one of the beers before putting the rest in the fridge.

“Was that a beer can I heard?”

“Yup.”

“Good girl. So how was your first day?” She could hear a faint sound of splashing and voices in the background.

“Fine,” she repeated.

“Were people nice?”

Abby frowned. “Some of them?”

“Only some of them?” He sounded concerned, and Abby panicked a little, not wanting to have a Concerned Parent™ on her hands. “It’s high school,” she said. “If nobody’s being an ass to you, you’re supposed to suspect it’s an alien experiment, remember?”

Halcyon laughed lightly. “Yeah, I guess that’s easy to forget. Do you think you’ll make some friends, at least?”

“Hm, I’d give it about a 35% chance at this point.” Abby tried her best to keep the dejected slump in her shoulders out of her voice.

Halcyon hummed in acknowledgment. “Not the best odds.”

“But not the worst,” she countered.

“How about your classes? Are you going to be really behind?”

“Honestly, most of it looks like a cake walk.” Then she grimaced. “Except that somehow I’ve ended up in AP Murder, and I don’t even know if I’m ready for basic Murder.”

“You wanna talk to the administration about it?” he asked. “I’ll sign off on whatever you want.”

Abby chewed her lip, thinking it over. “Maybe wait a few weeks and see how it’s going?” she said.

“Are you sure?” Abby caught a loud peal of distinctly feminine laughter in the distance.

“You know the requisite king of assholes that every high school has?” Abby said, fiddling with the tab on her beer can. “Well, he’s in that class and I don’t want him to think he’s run me off.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line before Halcyon answered, confusion clear in his voice. “Is this one of those Viking things about honor and what not?”

“Yeah, something like that. With a healthy dose of not showing fear lest you excite a swarm of bullies.”

“Alright…” he said. “If that’s how you want to handle this…”

“HaAaAaL…” another voice echoed through the phone. Abby couldn’t stop the grin that crept up her face. “Yeah, Hal,” she said, “that’s how I want to handle it. Now you should quit worrying about me and get back to your guests.”

“Alright, well, I love you, sweetie.”

“Love you too, Hal.”

Abby ended the call, then slumped back on her futon, glaring up at the ceiling. “Fuck my life,” she muttered.


	2. Chapter 2

The rest of Abby’s first week passed in a blur. Amira and her friends continued to tolerate her presence, even going so far as to invite her out to shop for prom clothes that weekend. She tried to politely decline, saying she had no intention of attending, but Vicky grabbed her hand and batted her eyelids. “You don’t have to get anything,” she whined. “Just give us your opinion while we try stuff on!”

“It’s easier to just say yes,” Brian muttered out of the side of his mouth.

Abby had already gotten that impression, and really it was a better way to spend her Saturday than moping at home or getting started on her AP Murder assignment. Besides, these folks were starting to grow on her, and Amira mentioned they could grab lunch at her parents’ restaurant on the house.

In all honesty, things were going better than Abby had expected — with one very angry red exception. Damien continued to either brutally ignore her or glare entire broadswords in her direction. Dodgeball turned into Deathball when they were on opposing teams, and even when Coach caught on and put them on the same side, the demon went out of his way to make sure she got out in the most painful and/or humiliating ways possible. Getting Abby Out became a weird kind of currency, with rumors flying that Damien had killed someone for the veela that had given her a bloody nose.

Abby was only mildly annoyed by the situation. She feigned nonchalance most of the time, but she was enjoying both the challenge and Damien’s pouting when she managed to best him. If she could just get him to stop making angel jokes…

“But how am I supposed to get Liam to notice me and not think I’m a sell out?” Oz was saying as they picked at the roc egg shakshuka Amira’s dad had fixed them for lunch.

“You’ve followed him on Instagram, right?” Vicky asked.

They nodded. “But he didn’t follow me back.”

“What if you started posting a bunch of food pics too?” the Frankenstein suggested.

“They can’t do that,” Amira cut in with her customary eye roll. “Then Liam will just think they’re being derivative.”

“Have you considered trying to out-hipster him?” Abby asked, shaking Damien from her head.

Vicky was taken aback. “Is that even possible?” she gasped.

“Sure,” Abby replied. “Hipsterdom is all about trying to achieve an impossible lifestyle while rejecting all excuses for anything less, so there has to be at least one arena where Oz can out-hipster him. Instagram is out, but what about music?”

Oz shrugged. “I mean, I really like shadow drone, but it’s kind of an acquired taste. Like, it literally drove Brian insane for about a week.”

“Oh yeah,” Brian said, with a slight smile pulling at the gap in his face. He kept it really clean compared to a lot of zombies Abby had seen. “That was a fun week.”

“You were possessed by Helvetica the Unholy!” Vicky reminded him incredulously. “You killed Gwilliam the Incubus and then brought him back without his serifs!”

“The really crazy thing is that you brought him back at all,” Amira added, dipping a fry in a dish of cayenne cumin ketchup she and Brian were sharing (the zombie claimed his tastebuds were so far gone that a little more damage was worth the flavor). “That guy is a serious piece of garbage.”

“Anyway,” Oz said, shaking their head, “it’s not the easiest music to share.”

“Okay, we’ll keep that as, like, plan F,” Abby went on, dipping her own fry in the dish of ketchup that was not so spicy it made you want to rip your own face off. “What about transportation? What’s Liam ride?”

“A 1966 Vespa 180 Super Sport,” Brain answered promptly. Oz stared at him. “He brought it into the shop a couple weeks ago,” the zombie explained, rubbing the back of his neck with one meaty palm.

Abby grinned. “This is perfect. Relying on fossil fuels is so mainstream. Tell me, Oz, have you ever ridden a fixie?”

“A what?” they asked.

“A fixed gear bike. Maybe the most authentic form of transportation that isn’t, you know, crawling.”

Oz thought it over. “I mean, I know how to ride a regular bike,” they said eventually, “but I don’t have a ton of extra cash…”

Abby waved them off. “We’ll find you a cheap piece of shit. I’m sure that between me and Brian we can fix it up into something rad.”

Which was how, after spending all Saturday watching other people try on fancy clothes, Abby ended up spending all Sunday on Operation Oz’s Rad Bike. She had not underestimated her and Brian’s skill and, fortunately, Oz’s nature as a miasma of dread incarnate kept them from hurting themself too much in the inevitable how-do-I-ride-a-bike-with-no-braking-mechanism mishaps. When Oz pulled up to school on Monday with the flashy gold-plated rims Brian had managed to find somewhere, Liam wasn’t the only one who noticed, but the vampire was the one who invited them to appreciate his artistic plating at lunch that day. And every day for the rest of the week.

Actually, by Friday, Abby’s lunchtime company had dwindled to just Brian. Amira discovered that Vera hated Gwilliam the Incubus as much as she did and was very interested in the extensive documentation Amira had collected of said incubus’s hopes and fears, so they now spent lunch together, heads bent over a tableful of charts and data analyses while shooting the occasional malicious glance toward where Gwilliam was leering at the cheerleaders. Abby wished them the best of luck in that particular endeavor.

Meanwhile, Vicky had finally worked up the nerve to just march up to Scott’s table… and sit down. To no one’s surprise, Scott greeted her with an enthusiastic wag of his tail and immediately asked if she wanted to see his Pokemans.

So on Friday, Abby made her way with her wings carefully tucked against her back toward a table that seemed to be completely empty except for Brian. Unfortunately, she’d already sat down before she realized why Brian as looking between his legs. “So you just stay right there,” Polly was saying, “and act like everything is normal, especially if Martin comes in.”

Abby didn’t think Brian processed much of that — the view of Polly’s tits from this angle was pretty spectacular — but he nodded mutely.

“Oh good, angel cake is here,” said another infuriatingly familiar voice. Of course it would be Damien trapped under her lunch table. “Shit, there he is! Spread your wings a little more.”

Abby did no such thing.

“Why is he after us anyway?” Polly asked. “I mean, what we did really falls more under federal jurisdiction.’

“International law, more like,” Damien amended. “Those munchkins were Canadian citizens.”

Polly’s lips twisted into a pout. “Now that you mention it, we might have to face a war crimes tribunal.” Brian was still staring at her cleavage. She obviously knew and had zero problem with it.

“Worth it though, right?” Damien asked with a grin.

“Oh totally,” Polly agreed. “As long as we can get away from Buzzkill the Bear over there.”

Martin the Janitor had started searching the cafeteria, nose twitching as he made a point of peering under every table. Brian finally tore his eyes away from the expanse of boob beneath him to look over at Abby slack-jawed, face pleading for help. Abby wracked her brain for a way to make the zombie a hero in front of his crush and opened her mouth before the idea had time to fully coalesce. “Hey Brian,” she started, “weren’t you just tell me about a… uh… secret room that… uh… rejects anyone with a pulse?”

For several long seconds, Brian stared at her like she’d just grown a manticore head, then he blinked and stuttered, ‘Y-yeah, that is totally a thing I found…”

“I don’t have a pulse!” Polly exclaimed, shooting up from under the table so Brian’s broad shoulders hid her from Martin’s view. “Let’s go!”

“I have a pulse!” Damien whine through gritted teeth, grabbing at Polly’s ankles.

“Should have thought of that before you decided to be alive,” the ghost singsonged as she floated out of his reach and followed Brian out of the cafeteria.

Damien glowered for several long moments before realizing the werebear was still on the hunt. “Shit,” he spat. “Seriously, fluff out your wings some more and get really huffy like you do if he tries to move them.”

Abby stared down at the demon in disbelief. He couldn’t seriously be that self-absorbed… no, he most definitely could. So Abby hooked her wings over the back of her chair, sleeking down the dark gray feathers and crossing them delicately, leaving Damien fully exposed.

Martin found him almost immediately and dragged him away to the principal’s office.

He was still gone when AP Murder rolled around, which was a real shame considering Ms. Demonslayer gave a particularly fascinating lecture on assassinations featuring demonic possession that seemed right up Damien’s alley. When he finally did reappear at gym, smoke and heat was roiling off his body as he stalked over to where Liam and Polly were waiting for the day’s teams to be assigned. “Fuck, I’m so angry!” he shrieked. “I’m so angry, I wanna pull my own skull out and eat it!” That caught the attention of pretty much everybody, with some monsters coming out of the locker rooms half-dressed to see what had Damien so riled up this time. Abby had come to understand that paying attention to Damien’s moods was something of a survival skill, especially considering what came out of his mouth next. “I’m so angry I wanna set the school of fire and then PUNCH THE FIRE IN ITS FUCKIN’ FACE!” Suddenly realizing what an audience he had, Damien spun to address the whole room. “I’m so angry,” he threatened, “that I want to spend years accumulating political capital so I can become president, then use my nuclear codes to BLOW UP THE SUN!!!”

 _Fuck me_ , Abby thought. If Damien was talking about years of long-term planning, he was seriously pissed. Her stomach may have jumped up into her throat when his eyes found hers (though she’d never, on pain of death, admit it to her sisters). “AND YOU!” he roared, stomping over to tower over her. “You sold me out!”

Abby frowned harshly. Accusations of treachery and oath-breaking were taken very seriously in Vanaheim, but before she could protest her innocence, Damien was in her face. “Give me one good reason,” he said in a low, deadly tone, “why I shouldn’t punch you so hard that you’ll remember with melancholy the times when you could move without all your bones hurting.”

The gym as utterly silent. Abby had spread her wings slightly out of an ingrained response to threat — both to make herself look bigger and to give her more options if the fists started flying. She was confident she could hold her own against the prince of hell, but she wasn’t sure she’d come out on top. Best to start with the arena where she had a clear advantage, especially with this kind of audience. “Joke’s on you, pal,” she said with a carefully calculated smirk. “I’m a pragmatist. I avoid any idealization of the past because it has no use, and therefore I refuse to feel any kind of melancholy.”

“Ooh!” Liam crowed, or rather, announced in a slightly less bored voice than usual, “pragmatism burn! Violence always loses against well-constructed worldviews based on strong branches of philosophy.”

“YASSS!” Polly exclaimed. “Magnetism burn!”

One moment: total silence. The next: a wave of laughter erupted across the gym.

Damien’s eyes widened in horror as his face took on a dark pink shade. Even Abby was surprised by how well the tactic had worked, though she had a feeling Liam had taken her side more for Oz’s safe than the actual merit of the comment. As Damien started glancing left to right, she prepared to fade into the background as much as someone with a ten-foot wingspace could, but she was completely unprepared for what happened next. Later she would learn that this was Damien’s standard response to feeling cornered, but she could only look on in utter confusion when Damien started muttered in what sounded like late-Abaddonian Demonic.

Once she and her classmates had been pooped out by Raguloth the Unblinking Maw in rural Thailand, they spent the rest of the weekend waiting for Principal Giant Spider to arrange transport back to Monstropolis. Amira and Vera passed the entire time plotting how to get back at the demon for this latest infraction while Brian and Vicky joined Polly and Scott in pranking the locals, but Abby could only think about how freaked out her dad was going to be when she didn’t return his calls all weekend. When she finally got home on Sunday evening, the very first thing she did was plug in her phone and dial his number. “Thank fuck,” Halcyon said as soon as he answered. “Are you alright?”

“I mean, I’m mad as hell and covered in mosquito bites,” she replied, flopping bonelessly on her futon and stretching her wings all the way out. “I got stuck in Thailand.”

“I know. Your school called and said there was some kind of accident?”

Abby snorted. “Sure, ‘accident,’ in so far as Damien LaVey being born could never have been part of any god’s plan.”

“Who’s that?” Halcyon asked. “The kid who summoned the hell beast?”

“Yup. But nothing’s gonna happen to him because his dads are lords of hell or whatever.”

“Oh come on,” Halcyon countered. “So maybe nothing will happen at school, but you gotta believe that lords of hell are real disciplinarians. And anyway, there was something else I wanted to ask you about. Principal Giant Spider said that prom is next weekend but you hadn’t bought a ticket yet.”

Abby rolled her eyes. “That’s because I’m not going.”

“It’s okay to go without a date, you know,” Halcyon said, and it sounded like he had a whole speech planned. “You’re young, and this is a time in your life when you should be experimenting. You know, playing the field…”

“Hal,” Abby cut him off, “are you actually telling me to go out and sleep with a bunch of different people?”

“As long as you’re not doing anything you’re uncomfortable with and it’s all safe and consensual, then yeah.”

“Duly noted,” she replied dryly, “but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not going to prom.”

“Alright,” Halcyon said, clearly disappointed. “If that’s what you want.”

The worst part about Damien’s little tantrum was that Abby had been planning to spend the weekend working on a huge translation assignment for Forbidden Languages. Since the class only met twice a week in the first place, Professor Cruach was unforgiving regarding deadlines and had already sent an email telling the class that he didn’t care where they had been over the weekend or why they had been there — he did not give extensions. Of course, the email was written in Arcane Sumerian, so Abby wasted an hour translating just to discover she was still fucked.

She pulled an all-nighter and skipped gym the next day in order to have something to turn in, but she knew it was shitty work and that she’d be lucky to scrape a C. She was still in a pissy mood on Tuesday when she sat down behind Amira in Ruthless Rhetoric. “You and Vera have a plan for taking down Damien yet?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Amira admitted, “but if things go according to plan with Gwilliam the Incubus, she said she’d go to prom with me as compensation for my contributions.”

“How romantic.”

Amira shrugged. “If I wanted romance, I’d ask Cupid. Instead I want Vera’s thighs wrapped around my head.”

“They are pretty amazing thighs,” Abby conceded, but she would have preferred to hear that the jinn and the gorgon had turned their impressive retribution machine on a certain demon. Her notes on the best uses of nuclear weapons threats were scattered with doodles of a one-horned figure getting stabbed in a variety of ways.

There was a line out the cafeteria door when Amira and Abby arrived with Vera and her friend Miranda, followed by Miranda’s entourage of serfs. Without pausing, Vera marched forward, and the crowd magically parted around her — though her penchant for hiding poison-tipped needles on her person may have been a contributing factor. Oz was standing against one wall with Liam and Polly. “What’s going on?” Amira asked them.

An unholy shriek exploded from the kitchen and Mephistophelinda the lunch lady burst through the doors, threatening to quit for the third time since Abby’s first day at SHS. Everyone knew it was a bluff; the demoness enjoyed subjecting young people to mediocre food too much to ever actually leave, much to their chagrin.

“Damien seems to be on another rampage,” Oz explained quietly.

“Oh gods,” Amira groaned. “What about this time?”

“Bananas,” Liam said boredly. “I’d be the first to admit they’re a rather mainstream fruit, but they are so not worth this level of attention.”

Damien emerged from the cafeteria kitchen at that point, yellow fruit held aloft. “You think you’re richer in potassium than me?!” he screamed. “No one is richer in potassium that DAMIEN FUCKING LAVEY!”

Seeing him there, snarling and snapping like the biggest troll on the whole fucking trash mounting, broke the last of Abby’s patience. Before she realized what she was doing, she had snatched the banana from Damien’s claws, peeled it, and taken a big bite. She stared him down as she ate the whole thing, dropping the skin on the toe of his boot. As she licked her fingers clean, he seemed to find his voice. “What are you doing, fuckhead?” he snapped.

“Being richer in potassium than Damien fucking LaVey,” she replied deadpan.

Behind her, Vera let out a malicious peal of laughter, followed shortly by Polly’s giggles once her drunk brain processed what might be amusing about the situation.

Damien’s mouth twisted into a deeper frown as his eyes jumped up to take in his laughing friends before they returned to glaring at Abby. “This is it,” he said, tone dripping with menace. “This is the last time to dare fuck with me, you bastard. On prom night, we’re going to share a very special dance. Spoiler alert: it will hurt.”

Abby was seeing red as soon as the b-word left Damien’s mouth. “What did you just call me?” she bit out.

Damien grinned widely, seeing he’d hit a nerve. “Oh, you mean ‘bastard’? Implying your mother was dumb enough to get knocked up by whatever piece of trash she found in the gutter?”

Abby’s fists were clenched so tight her knuckles were screaming in agony, but it was background noise to the roaring in her ears. “Alright, you sunburnt ball sack,” she said, sounding surprisingly calm to herself. “Prom night.”

“Oooh!” Polly cheered. “That’s a prom fight on prom night: Damien versus Abby! Instant classic!”

“A primitive yet alluring spectacle,” Liam added. “I may have to attend.”

“Damn right,” Damien said, striding past Abby, who was still frozen in place, shoulders heaving with rage. He made a point of bumping against her wing. “You all have tickets to watch how I reduce Angel Cake’s bones to sad, shapeless pulp.”

“YASSS!” Polly wailed. “Free tickets!”


	3. Chapter 3

“Do you really think you’re up to fighting Damien?” Oz asked Abby after order had been restored to the cafeteria. 

Abby glanced around their usual table. Vicky, Brian, Oz, Amira — they’d left their crushes and potential prom dates to gather around her in her moment of crisis, if that term even applied. “My mom is a war goddess, remember?” she said in a low tone. “I was half-raised on the battlefield. Damien will be a fun distraction.”

Vicky’s eyes were as wide as they could get when one eyelid seemed to have shorted out. “Do you know how many underground fighting rings he’s been kicked out of?” she whispered urgently, leaning across the table. “At least three—”

“Four,” Amira corrected. “He just got banned from the one I’ve been going to.” She looked at the shocked expressions around her. “What? I’ve got some shit I’m trying to work through.”

After an awkward pause which ended with Amira both blushing and looking like she was ready to go a few rounds with the asshole prince of hell herself, Abby reiterated, “I’ll be fine. And at least now my dad will get off my back for not going to prom.”

The next three days passed in a blur. Halcyon was predictably ecstatic and immediately offered to send her money for a prom attire. “My friend Amira bought a dress she isn’t wearing,” Abby told him, “and Brian can tailor it for me.” None of that was technically a lie, though Brian wouldn’t have had time to do any adjustments for her if she were going to wear Amira’s vetoed ensemble since he had his hands full with the jinn’s suit.

Gwilliam the Incubus was escorted away from school property by three burly police trolls Wednesday afternoon, and Amira happily reported after school that she and Vera were officially going to prom together. By that point, Oz had managed to out-hipster Liam into agreeing to go ironically and Vicky had asked Scott, who may have licked her face in his excitement. Polly had just started talking like she and Brian were going together and of course he and his friends would be coming over to her place afterwards, boo.

Damien had backed off his vindictive dodgeball play in favor of drawing elaborate illustrations of Abby’s mangled body during AP Murder and dropping them at her desk as he was leaving class. Abby had to admit, he wasn’t a bad artist, especially when it came to viscera and realistic blood spatter. Also her corpse’s eye make-up was always on fleek.

Friday, she was on her way to Civics when she was stopped by the unlikely pair of Vera and Scott. “Hey,” said the werewolf, furry brows knit tightly in concern, “I heard Damien talking about how he’s going to beat you up at prom.”

“Yeah!” Vera chimed in, eyes glinting malevolently. “Mess him up! He still needs to pay for that weekend in Thailand.”

“What?” Scott barked in shock. “Hey, I don’t believe in gratuitous violence.” He paused to rethink his position. “Unless I’m a werewolf, in which case one time I ate a kindergartener.”

Vera frowned. “You’re right, Scott. What’s the use of pointless violent? I should look into this upcoming carnage and think of a way to monetize it. Damien’s going around giving away free tickets to watch him pluck Abby like a chicken. Such a lack of business perspective is discouraging.”

“That’s not nice,” Scott countered. “Why haven’t I gotten free tickets?”

Abby and Vera both stared at Scott in disbelief for entirely different reasons before the gorgon returned to attention to the valkyrie. “Anyway, Abby, what are you doing about this?” Her smile turned sly. “Might I interest you in some Oberlin Life Insurance? This might be a good time to get a policy.”

Before Abby could politely decline, Scott broke in. “Yeah Abby! What are you doing about this? Won’t you give us free tickets to watch Damien pluck you like a chicken? Don’t be rude, bro!”

“Honestly,” Abby said slowly, confused by the whole situation, “I was planning on getting my own free ticket from Damien. And as for the fight…” She smirked, suddenly feeling inordinately pleased with herself. “When I get done with him, they’ll be calling him Damien La-Flayed.”

Damien’s drawing that day was a particularly detailed image of her without skin. It actually looked like he’d done some research on the musculature of valkyrie wings. Or maybe he had a lot of hands-on experience denuding angels.

Amira insisted they go out for pizza and beer that night. “Can’t send you to your death without one last fancy-ass IPA of whatever,” she said. “Also, Vicky and I are telling our parents that we’re spending the night with you. It’s a lie that works even if you end up in the hospital.”

“And if you’re not in the hospital, you’ll be at Polly’s with us,” Vicky chirped, “so then it’s only a half-lie.”

Abby let out a half-groan. “What if I don’t want to go to Polly’s party?”

“Liam curated the beer selection,” Oz said, tipping the rim of their pint of fancy-ass IPA against hers.

Abby huffed. “Fine. If I don’t have to go to the hospital, I’ll consider coming.”

She got up early on Saturday morning and took her bike on a long ride around the city. Soon the streets around Spooky High would start filling with limos and chariots, but for now Abby was able to enjoy the quiet. Perched on one of the cliffs that made up the outer edge of Manbatsfield Park, she toyed with her phone and the idea of calling her mom. She hadn’t spoken to Freyja since she’d been kicked out of Sessrumnir. The goddess hadn’t tried to contact her once in the whole six weeks, probably too busy fucking her husband to think about the daughter she’d sent away.

Nope. No way she was calling Freyja. Not to just be rejected all over again.

She could call one of her sisters, maybe Kara or Mist. They were the closest to her in age — Kara was only 294 and Mist was 226 — and Mist was half-water elemental like her, so Abby felt more connected to them than the older valkyries like Brynhildr and Eir. Or she could call Alvitr; he’d been sent back to live with his dad for a while after coming out as a transman. He’d actually dropped her a line, back when she’d been staying with Halcyon, telling her this was all temporary and that he’d be around to talk if she wanted. It was sweet, but also misguided, since their situations were nothing alike. When Freyja had sent Alvitr away, according to Kara (who’d been a kid at the time), most of the valkyries had been vocal in their belief the goddess was making a mistake and being unnecessarily cruel. But no one had said a word against her decision with Abby, or even stepped in to interrupt Sanngridr’s accounting of all Abby’s failings…

Because for all the talk about how war wasn’t what it used to be and who knew if Ragnarok was even a thing anyway, nobody thought Abby was a very good valkyrie. That was why Eir turned down her request to join the sisters in Valhalla. That was why Brynhildr wouldn’t let her enter the ranks of Folkvangr. Just like Sann had said, they all thought she was spoiled and weak-blooded, ungraceful as Hildisvini, plain as a jotunn, and — they hoped — their mother’s last mistake. Sure, maybe a handful would give her the benefit of the doubt, say something about how perhaps time and training would temper her, but none of them really expected her to show her face at Sessrumnir again.

Which was why Abby had to fight Damien. To see for herself if she’d just been the coddled baby of her mother’s house or if she actually had anything of a warrior in her. To prove to herself that Sann hadn’t been entirely right about her.

At least if she died tonight, whichever of her sisters came to scrape her soul off the floor could enjoy a nice long I-told-you-so.

Back home, she went through an elaborate pre-battle routine. She trimmed and filed her nails. Damien would probably sharpen his, but demon keratin was sterner stuff than hers, and she’d rather minimize the risk of tearing one off. Then, she picked an almost-black blue polish and went through the process of base coat, color coat, and top coat — a little added protection and it made her feel fierce. She slicked her short brown hair back with gel, then set to work on her make-up, using her darkest eyeliner around her eyes and packing on a cream eyeshadow that wouldn’t run. She skipped mascara and lipstick; she had first-hand experience with how distracting it could be when your mascara flaked off in your eye in the middle of a fight, and trying to clean lip color out of a split lips was just a bitch.

Then she pulled on a pair of jeans, tugged one of her specially designed t-shirts with the low back that let her wings hang free up over her hips and onto her shoulders, and strapped on her ankle boots before giving herself a whole minute to scrutinize her reflection. The pair of intense eyes that looked back were comforting, even if her stomach was a little twisted. “Asshole shoulda known better than to fuck with you,” she told herself.

People were staring as soon as her Uber dropped in front of the school. As she walked into the gym, Juan the small cucuy called out, “Hey Damien! Your date is here.”

“Date?” Damien snapped as he approached the entryway, glaring at Juan. “I’m breaking her bones, idiot. Conflating love language with violence is problematic and can totally lead to toxic relationships.”

Abby watched in bemusement as Juan the small cucuy was pulled out of Damien’s immediate vicinity by Juan the big cucuy, then she was entirely focused on the prince of hell. In the back of her head, she could hear a replay of Vicky saying, “He’s a hot asshole,” as she took in the trimly tailored suit, the lazily done bow-tie, and the crisp yet subtle smoky eye he was totally rocking.

“What, you can’t even dress up for me to kick your ass?” he said, looking entirely unimpressed by what he was seeing.

She shrugged. “I hear demon blood is this season’s hot new look anyway. Also, I don’t like fighting in dresses.”

He snorted, with something that almost looked like a real smile. “Fair enough.”

Abby found her eyes glued to his ass as he walked away. Fortunately Vicky trounced over in an adorable polka-dotted dress to interrupt her leering before anyone noticed. “You made the Prom-gramme!” she exclaimed, waving around a piece of paper with too much blood spatter and glitter.

“Yeah,” Scott agreed, bounding up beside his date, and Abby fought back a tsunami of squee as she realized that Vicky’s dress matched Scott’s eyes. “The fight is scheduled right after they announce prom royalty,” the werewolf went on.

“Probably to try to distract from the fight that always breaks out after the announcement,” Liam added as he and Oz joined them. Oz was looking at Liam like they still couldn’t quite believe the vampire was there and, wonder of wonders, holding their hand.

“How many proms have you been to?” Abby asked after giving the fear entity a little wave.

Liam glowered slightly at the mention of his age. “Enough to know that there’s always a fight after they announce prom royalty.”

Abby actually took a look at the program Vicky held out for her. “Shit, if I’d known I’d be sitting around this long, I wouldn’t have shown up so early.”

“You won’t be sitting around,” Vicky corrected. “You’ll be dancing.”

Abby looked at her blankly. “No, I won’t.”

Abby found herself a spot at the top of the bleachers and, in spite of Vicky’s protests and Oz’s gentle nudging, she did not move for the duration of the evening. Instead, she watched her prey: Damien hadn’t come with a date, but he spent plenty of time with Miranda, who had shown up with three suitors and a series of contests that pit them against each other for her affection (and Damien’s amusement). The demon was drinking, but not heavily — Polly had poured an unlabeled bottle in the punch bowl almost the second she and Brian arrived — and it looked like he’d be reckless-and-flimsy drunk but not yet falling-down drunk, which would probably put Abby ad a slight disadvantage. Luckily, Polly was all too willing to come to her aid. “Hey boo!” the ghost exclaimed as she floated up to Abby’s level, Brian tromping up the stairs in her wake.

“Damn, Brian,” Abby said, looking the zombie over. She’d seen the suit when he’d pulled it off a discount rack, but with the custom tailoring he’d done? “You look sharp enough to be part of Miranda’s silverware collection.”

“Doesn’t he!” Polly gushed, eyeing her date appreciatively.

Brian rubbed the back of his neck shyly. “Thanks, but I think I did an even better job with Amira’s.”

Abby looked in the direction he indicated, spotting a whirl of fire in black on the dance floor. She whistled; Brian’s work accentuated the jinn’s hips but drew sharp straight lines down her torso for an androgynous look that Amira killed, especially when paired with Vera’s oozing femininity. “Hot,” she said.

“So you ready for this fight or what?!” Polly called to be heard over the opening notes of Fright! At the Monster Mash.

Abby waved her hand dismissively. “I was ready when I got here,” she complained. “What did you put in the punch?” Knowing exactly what she was dealing with would help in figuring out how much to drink for peak not-giving-a-damn.

“Toilet wine!” the ghost replied cheerily. “But you who are about to die deserve better.” Polly pulled a flask out of the neckline of her dress — which was impressive given how form-fitting it was — and handed it to Abby with a flourish. “Ultra whiskey.”

Abby unscrewed the cap and took a sniff, eyebrows shooting up as the fumes hit her nose. It was most certainly whiskey. She took a sip, swallowed, nearly hacked up a lung to Brian and Polly’s amusement, then took another swallow for good measure. The whiskey settled into a pleasant warmth in her belly. “Not bad,” she said as she handed the flask back.

Once the song ended, the DJ announced it was time to crown Prom Royalty, and Abby felt a familiar anticipation start to grow in her chest and buzz right behind her eyes. No, she decided as some monster she’d never met was named prom king, that buzzing was definitely the Ultra Whiskey, and the sensation of hyperawareness and fluidity spread down her arms and legs and out to the tips of her wings. She was rippling water, always on the move, never in the way…

Perfect.

She didn’t know the monster who was named prom queen either, and judging by the looks on Vera and Miranda’s faces, they were not happy with the outcome. One of Miranda’s suitors rushed forward to stab the newly-appointed queen in an effort to impress the mer princess, but unfortunately for him, the queen was a physical manifestation of hunger and gobbled him up and he made the attempt with a murder spoon, which even Abby knew was a serious faux pas.

But all that was soon forgotten as Damien started yelling at people to clear the dance floor while stripping to the waist. Abby stood, waving to her friends. “Whatever happens,” she said, “don’t call my dad.”

The crowd parted around her as she fairly floated down the bleachers. Some people slapped her on the shoulder; others told her what a painful death she was about to experience. Abby ignored them all equally. She only had eyes for a certain prince of hell who was cracking his knuckles and grinning maniacally. Once she was in the open space of the gym floor, she stretched her wings and scuffed her boots against the wood to get a feel for the traction. Coach stood between them, looking overly enthusiastic about overseeing a supposed death match between two of his students. “Alright, this is hand-to-hand only,” the weretiger said. He gave Damien a pointed look. “That means no knives and no fire.” They he looked at Abby with some confusion. “And no… heavenly arrows or whatever.” Abby sighed. She supposed angels and valkyries had something in common there.

Damien was charging at her as soon as Coach blew his whistle, but Abby was expecting it and easily sidestepped, whipping around a wing to strike him on the back as he went by, sending him flying. She eyed him warily as he got up — no way she was going to get in close, not until she had a better sense of what she was up against — but Damien just had the same grin plastered to his face as his tail whipped around savagely. He approached more cautiously this time, like he had realized he had an actual fighter on his hands and not just someone to beat to a pulp. Abby raised her hands, pulling into loose fists, and ducked her head. They traded a few punches, feeling each other out. Damien seemed wary of her wings, and she landed a solid hit to his chin by flicking one to distract him. He answered with a couple of kidney shots that would probably leave her pissing blood. She tried to dance away from him, throwing feathers in his face as a screen, but his tail wrapped around her ankle quick as a viper and tripped her up. Before she knew it, she was on the ground and he was on top of her, wailing on her face and head. She got her hands up as fast as she could, then managed to get her wings behind him to pull him in close to her body — too close to use his fists. In his moment of confusion, Abby grabbed his unbroken horn and delivered a brutal headbutt to the demon’s nose.

Blood sprayed everywhere. When Abby got out from underneath him and back on her feet, she spit out a gob of the seriously hot fluid along with some of her own from busted lip. The crowd, she noticed, was in a complete uproar. Even Coach had a little blood lust in his eye as he directed a mildly dazed Damien back to the center of the makeshift ring. And Abby? Her blood was singing all the battle arias of her people, and she felt amazing. Fighting Damien felt too good to even bother with slowing down her perception of time — she wanted it all fast and hard… she wanted her whole body on the line…

With a few shakes of his head, Damien seemed back to himself. He was grinning once again as he approached, fists up, but it was different — less insane and more like real enjoyment. “Not bad, noob,” he said as they started to circle each other again. “But can you finish what you started?”

“Oh I can definitely finish you,” Abby answered with a smile that pulled at her split lip painfully.

The demon had figured out that she didn’t want him to get too close, so he started using his tail to lash around an arm or leg or even her middle in order to keep her trapped within his reach. The tail was also a sharp motherfucker, and she ended up with stinging little lacerations all over. But Damien still wasn’t sure what to do about her wings, so while her arms and hands were busy protecting her head and torso, her wings struck wherever they could, buffeting Damien’s head and striking his sides. She didn’t draw nearly as much blood as he did, but his grunts and gasps told her he was feeling it. Once of these hits knocked him back down, but his tail pulled her with him. She got a knee into his ribs as she came down, but he landed a titty punch that really fucking hurt, and Abby scrambled away, nursing her left boob and struggling to catch her breath.

“Just finish her already!” someone called to Damien as he got back up, smearing half-congealed blood over his face. He held up his middle finger in the general direction of the critic and stalked toward Abby again. She struck first this time, lunging forward with a right hook followed by another slap to his side with a wing. It landed, but by this point she was too tired and too slow to get her guard up before Damien jabbed her face. She was knocked back several steps, then Damien was charging at her again, a sweaty, bloody, panting mess, tumbling on top of her as they both fell in a tangle of limbs. She landed awkwardly on one of her wings, trapping it under her body. She flopped the free one around, but without nearly the same force as before, and Damien batted at it as she tried to buck him off and get her hands anywhere near his face she could do damage. But her arms were so fucking heavy. At last, she managed to jab Damien’s probably broken nose with her thumb and he recoiled off her, but she couldn’t get back up on her feet as fast as she wanted. Actually, just getting to hands and knees was hard, and she felt vaguely aware of how much blood had pooled beneath her. “This is less fun when they beat the shit out of each other,” a werewolf said to her right.

Suddenly she was being lifted into the air and floating above the ground. “This has been fun, guys,” Polly was saying just above her as she phased through the wall of the gym with Abby and Damien in tow. “But Polly needs to get her twerk on, and you two slogging away at each other like the world’s oldest cage fighters is not conducive to that.” They were both dropped unceremoniously below the party tree, and by the time Abby had rolled over, Damien was the only one in sight.

The valkyrie lay flat on her back, arms and wings flared out, chest heaving. As the stars above slowly began to spin, she started laughing, a sound that opened with a hoarse chuckle and rose into a full body guffaw that had all her bones aching.

Then she realized Damien was laughing too.

For a while, they just lay there, the pair of them cackling like loons. Once she had reined herself in, Abby said, “Fuck, it’s been too long since I’ve had a fight like that.”

“Yeah, that was fucking fun,” the demon agreed. “You are definitely not the floppy testicle sac most people at this school are.”

“Well, I’ve always done my best not to be a floppy testicle sac,” she replied dryly.

Silence stretched out. Abby was thinking about how pretty the stars were when they looped overhead like that and was also wondering how much of the vertigo was Ultra Whiskey and how much was blood loss. Damien interrupted her mental inventory. “You were right,” he said. “In the cafeteria? Me grabbing your wings like that was a total dick move.”

Abby looked over at the demon in surprise — it sounded like Damien LaVey, asshole prince of hell, was trying to apologize — but he kept his eyes glued overhead. The string of lights on the party tree reflected off the blood still oozing lazily from his nose. “I’m also sorry for calling you a bastard. I forget that parentage, like, actually fucking matters in some parts of the world. Like, it’s not your fault if your parents’ shit wasn’t ideal or whatever.” He sighed deeply. “Look, I’m not trying to make excuses, but some shit’s been going down with my dads, and for some fucked up reason, I decided to take it out on you, and that wasn’t cool.”

Abby’s jaw had gone slack — which admittedly could have been the Ultra Whiskey/blood loss. When she got her brain back online, she said, “I’m sorry I ate your banana. That was a shitty thing to do.”

Damien barked a laugh. “Man, I had big plans for that banana. I was going to set part of the cafeteria on fire and toast it with some rum. I saw some asshole do it at a restaurant one time.”

“Alright, dude,” Abby said, suddenly feeling way more magnanimous toward the demon, “I’ll take you out for bananas foster. Better yet, I’ll learn to make bananas foster so you can set it on fire yourself.”

“Seriously?” Damien looked at her skeptically.

“Least I can do for someone who let me therapeutically kick the shit out of him.”

“Oh no, bitch,” Damian countered. “I definitely kicked the shit out of you.” He grimaced as he sat up. “But I do think you broke a couple of my ribs.”

“Pretty sure I’ve got some minor kidney damage over here,” Abby admitted. She worked to sit up herself, just then noticing the gout of blood pouring from the edge of one wing.

“Do you wanna go to Polly’s party with me?” Damien asked without preamble.

Abby felt a pleased heat run through her — probably the whiskey again. “Sure,” she said, as long as you’ll cauterize this blood feather before I bleed out.”


	4. Prom Night Interludes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some little snippets of what our favorite player characters were getting up to on prom night...

**AMIRA**

“You’ve been a decent prom date,” Vera said as Amira kissed down the long stretch of the gorgon’s neck in the upstairs bathroom of Polly’s mansion. “So I guess you can eat me out.”

Amira ceased her worship of entirely flawless skin to give her date a skeptical look. “You guess I can eat you out?” she repeated.

Vera returned her gaze cooly. “Did I stutter?”

“I have to assume you did since I didn’t hear any mention of reciprocity,” Amira answered, taking a step back from the other woman. “And Vera Oberlin should know that when you’re good at something, you never do it for free.”

The gorgon snorted. “How do I know you’re good at it?”

Amira shrugged, smirking. “You felt my tongue just about everywhere else on your body.”

Vera decided to drop that line of questioning, which Amira counted as a point in her favor. “You know I could walk out that door and get almost anyone to replace you, right?” she tried instead.

“Fine, do it.” The jinn pretended to study her nails. “But then you’d be admitting to everyone that you made a mistake when you chose me as your prom date.”

For a long three seconds — the longest three seconds of Amira’s life — Vera looked supremely, even murderously, annoyed, then her face broke into a smile. “You are fucking ruthless,” she admitted, grabbing the lapels of Amira’s jacket and pulling her close again. Their lips met in a kiss, hot and dry against cool and smooth. Amira’s head was spinning when Vera released her. “What exactly are you proposing?” the gorgon breathed into her neck.

“Like I said.” Amira fought to keep her voice level. “Reciprocity. Maybe a little friendly competition. Let’s see if Vera Oberlin really is the best at everything.”

It was a competition with no losers, so long as you didn’t count the poor swamp goblin Vera turned to stone when he opened the wrong door. His days were numbered anyway.

  


  


**VICKY**

Somehow, someone managed to slip Scott some cocaine.

Later, rehashing the evening with her friends, Vicky would come to suspect the wolf pack was behind it, since they’d already given Scott a hard time about going to prom with her instead of hanging out with his bros. It was a plan that showed a remarkable amount of forethought for them: nice Frankenstein girl wants to date nice werewolf because he’s a good boy; cocaine makes nice werewolf into a ferocious killing and/or fucking machine; ergo, feeding nice werewolf cocaine would scare nice Frankenstein girl away.

Even later, Polly would fess up to having supplied the cocaine to the wolf pack after Amira told her about Vicky’s erotic friend fiction. “Just wanted to turn some of those fantasies into realities, boo,” the ghost said with a wink. Vicky couldn’t decide if she had the best friends or the worst.

In any case, right around the time the clock struck midnight, Scott went from being a kind of hairy perfect gentleman who snuck an occasional kiss when he thought no one was looking to a really hairy gentleman who snarled suggestive if less-than-coherent scenarios in her ear as he ground his massive erection against her on the dance floor. He started pulling her away from the crowd and toward the huge staircase that she assumed led up to some bedrooms — and Vicky was only too happy to go — when they were cut off by Polly and Damien. Scott growled in frustration, but Polly just giggled as she said, “Whoa there, big guy! Did you even ask the lady if she wanted to go upstairs?”

The werewolf whined his confusion, tail dropping as he looked between Polly and Vicky. “Want mate,” he said, and it wasn’t clear if it was a question or a statement, but it was something.

“Yeah, I can see you do, bro,” Damien said, his two black eyes only making him look more serious than usual. “But we’ve talked about this. You gotta use your words cause the rest of us don’t have fucking animal instincts or whatever.”

Scott’s face fell like someone had told him he was a bad boy, and Vicky couldn’t stand it, so she squeezed his hand as she said, “I want to go with him.”

“Aw, ya hear that, big guy!” Polly squealed. “She wants to go upstairs with you. So let’s go find a room and get it all ready while Damian talks to Vicky for a minute.”

Scott looked at her longingly, tail thumping against her thigh, but he didn’t budge until Vicky assured him that she’d be right up. She was a little annoyed at being cockblocked, or at least cock-delayed, but if the king and queen of bad decisions thought it was important, she’d give them the benefit of the doubt.

“We’re not, like, trying to white knight you or whatever,” Damien said as Scott followed Polly. “Scott doesn’t do so good with consent when he’s like this, and we keep trying to reinforce good habits so hopefully he won’t do something he regrets when one of us isn’t around.”

Vicky understood the cause for concern. Killing a kindergartener during a full moon didn’t phase him, but if Scott found out he had raped somebody? It would crush him.

“Also just wanted to make sure you know what you’re getting into,” Damien went on. “I know getting laid on prom night is the goal, but Scott’s only got one mode when he’s gone full werewolf, and that’s rough, possessive, and all night long, so if you’re not feeling into that—”

“I am,” Vicky interrupted, then blushed at her own admission. “I-I mean,” she tried to backtrack, but Damien was grinning at her in a knowing way. “Then you’re in the for ride of your life, kid,” he said. “So if things get too… whatever, the safe word is ‘bubblegum.’ Liam used some kind of vampire hypnosis voodoo to make it a total Scott boner killer, temporarily at least. Call me or Polly if you need anything and use plenty of lube.”

Damien strode off like he hadn’t just given her a safety briefing on sex with Scott Howl… that included so much detail that she had questions regarding the source of his information.

Which meant Oz was totally wrong about that one friendfic being completely unrealistic.

But that was the last thing on her mind when she found the room Scott was pacing. She barely had time to take in the kind-of made bed (there was a blanket on it) and the bottle of lube on the nightstand before her stomach bottomed out at the feeling of Scott pressing his body behind hers and lapping at her neck. “Pretty Vicky,” he rumbled, pawing at her dress and rubbing his length against her ass. “Pretty mate.”

Vicky let out a groan as he kneaded her breasts, then pulled away to get naked before he could ruin her dress.

Her skin was an entirely different matter.

  


  


**OZ**

Oz went through the first drink Liam put in their hand way too fast. They were nervous, and lifting glass to mouth was something for their hands to do while their feet kicked against the scuffed kitchen cabinets and their eyes traveled up and down the sexiest vampire they had ever seen. Liam poured liquor like a painting, arms carefully arched, vodka gleaming in the light of the disco ball. He never spilled.

And when he glanced over his shoulder to smirk at his date? Oz’s mouth went dry and they took another drink.

“Did you like it?” Liam asked them, reaching for their empty glass. “I know mai tais are mainstream, but so few people have actually had a proper mai tai that isn’t just an amalgamation of gross flavored rum.”

“It was great,” Oz said, nodding their head. “I especially liked the light floral aftertaste.”

Liam smiled at them. “That’s the orgeat. Some people make orgeat with rose water, but I prefer the more traditional orange blossom myself.” He leaned against the counter, letting his hip brush against Oz’s thigh. Oz’s stomach did a weird thing. It did even more of a weird thing when Liam leaned in closer to their ear. “So what’ll you have next?”

“S-surprise me?” Oz stuttered.

Liam pressed a little kiss to their cheek before he moved back to his makeshift bar. Oz smiled, and the dozen little fearlings that popped up along their shoulders and arms smiled too. The vampire returned with two glasses sporting identical greenery. “This is a Caribbean racehorse,” he said into Oz’s ear. “It’s my interpretation of a Kentucky mule.”

Oz went to take a sip but started coughing when the fumes from the glass hit the back of their throat. “Holy shit,” they croaked as Liam laughed. “What is that?”

“Jamaican ginger beer,” Liam explained. “They like it spicy down there. Just don’t breathe in when you go to drink.”

Oz didn’t and found the sweet, spicy, tangy drink quite to their liking. “This is great,” they said. “You’re really good at this.” 

Liam looked like he was glowing in the disco light. “It’s nice to have someone who appreciates a carefully curated flavor palette,” he said.

Oz finished the second drink a bit more slowly than the first — it was hard to gulp down — and Liam made him another of his favorite cocktails. “Hemingway and I used to argue about mojitos versus mint juleps,” he said as Oz sniffed the new offering (and wasn’t nasally assaulted by aggressive rhizomes). “We both agreed that mint juleps was far too popular for its relative merits, but I could never convince him that switching out bourbon for rum didn’t actually make that much of a difference.” Liam tapped the rim of Oz’s glass with his own. “Still, the mojito is a classic for a reason, I suppose.”

By the time Ghost in the Dance Machine was winding down, Oz was officially plastered. They were also officially sticking their tongue in Liam’s mouth, and Liam was officially into it. At least, Oz was getting nonverbal signals that Liam was into it. Liam also stuck his tongue in their mouth. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

“Get a room, you two!” Polly yelled suddenly, and Liam jerked back out of Oz’s reach.

“Ugh, Polly, can you ever not be loud and crass?” the vampire snapped, but Oz could see a little blush creeping up the vampire’s cheek. They could feel a blush creeping up theirs too, but it would never show against the night-black void of their physical manifestation.

“Nope!” Polly answered. She was pulling Brian along by the hand, the zombie looking like he didn’t want to get excited about what might be happening because then it wouldn’t happen. “But seriously, like, pick a room upstairs. Kitchen sex is hot and all, but it’s dangerous when your drunk. That’s how I died!”

Then she was chattering to Brian about drugs as they turned the corner to the stairs. And Oz was left in the kitchen, dazed and drunk and horny and drunk and…

“So,” Liam said, sliding his hands in his pockets and looking off toward the den where it sounded like Damien and Abby were still virtually murdering each other. “Do you want to, you know, go find a room upstairs? With me?”

Oz panicked. “I… I…”

“It’s cool if you don’t,” Liam backtracked, slouching even deeper into his pose.

“No!” Oz interjected. “I just…” They trailed off, unable to imagine any words that would explain that didn’t sound so completely and utterly stupid. They cradled their face in their hands, swaying a little at the vertigo from looking down. “I think I’m too drunk,” they admitted. “To, like, be comfortable doing… you know…”

In the next two seconds, Oz felt themselves drip down into a puddle of despair and heartbreak on the floor as they imagined Liam scoffing and walking away, also unable to find words to describe how stupid and dumb and uncool they were.

Instead, Liam lightly touched the outside of Oz’s leg. “That’s cool,” he said. “I mean, sex on prom night is basically the most fundamental cliche of high school.”

Oz looked up through their eyelashes. “Yeah?” they whispered.

Liam smiled. “Definitely.” When Oz let their hands fall from their face, Liam held one of them. “I’m happy to do whatever makes you happy right now.”

Oz couldn’t stop the little fearlings that popped out up and down their arms from all making love-struck eyes at the vampire. “Maybe we could go find a room and just… hang out?” they asked.

“Okay,” Liam said, helping them off the counter top and catching them when they immediately lost their balance. “I’m pretty sure by ‘hang out’ you mean ‘pass out,’ though.”

“Yeah,” Oz agreed, focusing carefully on getting one foot safely on the floor before they lifted the other, “but I’ll be passing out with you.”

  


  


**BRIAN**

Brian had been attracted to Polly since he’d first set eyes on her.

“Attracted” seemed like such an inadequate word to describe the almost gravitational pull he felt toward the ghost, the persistent draw. It wasn’t just that she was hot — though she was, unbelievably so — or that she was popular. It was that she was who Brian wanted to be in this second lease on psuedo-life he seemed to have.

Brian didn’t remember much from his living life. There were some hints, bits of muscle memory, like how it felt to hold a needle and thread or the right motions to take apart a gearbox. But he had no idea who his family had been, who he had been before coming back to his senses at the Center for the Newly Undead facility. The counselors there had told him that while some undead did seek out their previous friends and family, they generally advised against it due to the trauma it could cause for both the undead and the people they had been close to. Brian had taken that advice to his now-unbeating heart, accepted their suggestion for relocation and the part-time job they helped him find, and enrolled in SHS to build a new life for himself.

The one thing that Brian did seem to remember was fear. Not outright terror or even panic — more like a permeating low-level sense of dread. And “remember” was maybe too strong a word. It hit him more like deja vu, like when you see something you dreamed about or return to the site of a childhood memory. It happened the first time when Oz suggested Liam turn into a general sense of unease to escape the Slayer, and as a nagging anxiety settled into his slowly deteriorating bones, Brian experienced the same familiarity the first time he’d sewn a button after his death. This is what I used to feel like, he thought. This is what I used to feel like all the damn time. The constant impression that he had either just failed at something, or was about to fail at something, or was in the process of failing at something.

But by most measures, the worst had already happened. He had died, and via some freak combination of the mystical and the biological, he’d come back, with nothing to fear but traumatic brain injuries and accelerating the decomposition of his remaining flesh by neglecting a regular intake of stem cells — which, the CNU folks assured him, wouldn’t be a problem so long as he ate at least one aborted fetus a week.

Brian didn’t want to live with that fear anymore. Brian wanted to spend his new life experiencing all the things he most likely avoided in his past life because he was too scared of the consequences.

Brian wanted to embrace death and all it had to offer.

Brian wanted to be like Polina Geist.

Of course, he wasn’t opposed to also fucking Polina Geist. Sex with the ghost was actually top on his list of things to try now that he was dead, and right after it was sex with Polly while he was high out of his fucking mind. So when Polly suggested they sample some of her latest creation for undead drug connoisseurs — something she was currently calling Banshee — Brian was ready to dive right in.

Later, by consulting with Abby and Oz about when he and Polly had disappeared from the party (combined with his own foggy memories of Ghost in the Dance Machine finishing their set), Brian determined that what had felt like weeks had actually been contained in about twelve hours. He couldn’t be entirely sure of how much of that had been spent sleeping and, really, that wasn’t important. What was important was how Polly had glowed as she rode his cock, how the ceiling of the bedroom had parted so the stars and all the gods of fucking could witness the way her tits bounced, how a squat guy named Bas had high-fived him when Polly came for the fourth or fifth time, how she coaxed more orgasms out of him than he physically thought was possible.

What was important was that after they were both exhausted and satisfied, they lay in Polly’s bed, telling each other about the strange shit they saw coming out of the walls, and Polly laughed uncontrollably when Brian tried to describe Bas oggling her breasts.

What was important was that when they woke up the following afternoon, Polly stretched in his arms and said, “Last night was supper fun. Maybe we can do it again sometime?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things:
> 
> 1\. I had way too much fun inventing a video game premise that used the title "Halo."
> 
> 2\. I love Damien's dads. I want them to be my dads.

Damien let Abby wear his helmet as he drove her to her apartment. He already had a hell of a concussion anyway, so why worry? After he’d cauterized her bleeding wing — burning feathers smelled just as bad as burning hair and he’d been smelling plenty of that lately — the valkyrie had insisted she needed fresh clothes before she was going anywhere. Damien kinda liked the blood-soaked look himself, but he agreed to take her home before they headed to Polly’s place. It sounded like the ghost was still enjoying wreaking havoc in the school gym anyway.

Abby lived above an apothecary in a studio apartment that was roughly the size of Damien’s closet. “I’m just gonna rinse my wings,” she said as she ducked into the tiny bathroom. “There’s beer in the fridge.”

Damien helped himself to both the beer and a slice of cold pizza as he perused the space. Kitchenette, small table that doubled as a desk if the stack of books was anything to go by — fucking nerd, he thought — two chairs, a futon that doubled as a bed, bookcase, laptop, TV, and hello! A slightly scratched RevelBase game console. He spied a small collection of games hidden among the books. Sanguinebirth, Ignot Cog Liquid V: Ghost Gore, and Killer’s Code: Journey were in the front. Munching on the last of the pizza crust, he looked over the books as well. It was mostly an assortment of philosophy and sci-fi with the occasional how-to guide or random history throw in. Damien was thumbing through a book on raising sheep when Abby emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel and looking mildly embarrassed. “Sorry,” she said, “I never think about taking clothes with me.”

“Whatever.” He got up from his place on the floor. “ I gotta piss.”

In the bathroom, he grinned at his reflection in the mirror. His nose was swollen, red skin taut and hot to the touch, and both eyes were blossoming gorgeous purple bruises that would look metal as hell. He used Abby’s eye pencil to touch up his liner — worrying about pink eye was for losers and monsters whose internal body temps didn’t run hot enough to immediately kill off most infections — then fished his dick out to empty his bladder. Abby was dressed by the time he was done, short hair sticking out in all directions as she scrutinized her appearance in the oven door. She glanced at him sardonically. “How do you manage to make ‘beat to hell’ look so good?”

“Practice,” he replied, coming up to examine her himself. After all, if he showed up at Polly’s with her, people might assume she was his date, so there was no reason not to make her look presentable. “Come one,” he said, tugging her back toward the bathroom. “Sit on the vanity.”

“What are you doing?” she asked when he started rummaging through her frightfully small stash of beauty products.

“I’m doing your make-up,” he replied, finding a primer that, to Abby’s credit, was both a good moisturizer and sun screen. “But if you ever so much as breathe a word of this to anyone, I will roast every last one of your feathers individually before I rip out your intestines to decorate my next nonreligious winter celebration tree.”

“News flash,” she said, letting him pat primer onto her cheeks and forehead. “Everyone at prom saw your eye liner.”

“It’s one thing if the prince of hell tries out a little eye liner,” he answered, distracted with dabbing product onto Abby’s swollen cheek as gently as possible. “It’s another thing when he wants to do it for someone else. Now shut up and hold still.”

Surprisingly she complied, closing her eyes and letting him tilt her chin this way and that. He found that, while the collection was meager, Abby had a good sense of her needs. She tended to stick with a cool-neutral palette that suited her soft-summer coloring. The dark brown eyeliner Damien had found earlier was the darkest thing in the whole little bin.

As he brushed some powder over his finished work, he said, ‘The trick to doing make-up with a smashed face is to not to cover it up. Instead, highlight it like you know you look like a bad motherfucker.” He stepped back to survey the overall effect, then gave a nod of satisfaction that no one saw but himself. “Take a look.”

Most of the damage to her face was bruising on one cheek and her forehead and a split lip, so he’d made her eyes bold as fuck. Along with the dark brown pencil on her waterline (her go-to look for day-to-day wear), he’d used a dark bronze shadow to create a dramatic aura around her brown eyes. Some blush made the bruise on her cheek pop beautifully, and he’d applied a nude pink lip color that made the split look like it was still bleeding.

“Damn,” Abby breathed, taking herself in. “I look like I don’t give one single fuck.”

Damien shrugged. “That’s the idea. Now do something with your hair so we can get the hell out of here. Polly’s gonna be home any minute, and you have to get there early to get the good booze.”

The party was just getting started when they pulled up to Polly’s mansion. “Holy shit,” Abby said as they came up the drive. “I didn’t know Polly had a house like this.”

Damien shut off the bike. “This is technically human territory,” he explained. “Every now and again someone new will buy the place and move in, but Polly just haunts them back out. Keeps their stuff most of the time too.”

Inside, the music was choir-of-the-damned levels of loud, and a former dining room was packed with writhing bodies. Normally, getting at least some of his genitals wet would have been high on Damien’s priority list, but he’d learned the hard way that sex with broken ribs was never as fun as it sounded, so he passed the dance floor after giving the hostess herself a little wave where she was grinding on her latest boy-toy. Abby was still trailing after him and she didn’t look inclined to find other company, so he leaned in to yell in her ear. “Go kick whatever fuckfaces are playing RevelBase off the couch! I’ll get us something to drink!”

She nodded and headed in the direction his tail had indicated while he went to raid the bar. Liam was showing off his ability to pour things in cups and shake — Damien would voluntarily give up his left nut before he’d call it “mixology” — and the shadow kid was perched on the counter behind him, eyes so wide and adoring that it made Damien want to barf a little.

“What’ll it be?” Liam asked him, trying to look nonchalant and kinda failing because he kept looking back at Oz. Damien reevaluated his position, moving the kid from “vomit-inducing” to “alright.” Anything that made Liam lose his cool was A-OK in his book.

But that didn’t mean Damien had to play along this dumb little charade. He grabbed the least empty bottle from the collection in front of the vampire, gave Liam’s I-am-so-annoyed-with-you-but-also-don’t-know-why-I-would-ever-expect-you-to-elevate-your-behavior face the finger, and sauntered his way into the den.

Abby was seated in the dead center of the couch in front of the big screen TV, flanked on either side by monsters who looked scared to infringe on her personal space. Billy Bogeyman was leaning so far away from one of her wings that he was basically draped over the armrest. He looked relieved for the excuse to scurry away when Damien glared down at him, and the Prince of Hell seated himself comfortably into the newly vacated seat, feathers brushing the shoulder of his suit jacket.

“Halo, huh?” he asked as he uncorked the bottle he’d appropriated. It turned out to be tequila, which was rad.

Abby shrugged as she flipped through the options on the screen. “I’ve only played a handful of times, but it’s what was already loaded.”

Damien took another hearty pull from the bottle before he handed it over and picked up a discarded controller. “Yeah, doesn’t really seem like your game.”

Abby twisted her upper body to give him a cool smile, tequila dangling lightly from her fingertips and split lip shimmering softly in the glow from the TV. “Are you referring to the fact that this is a game in which fallen angels hunt down and take vengeance on their heavenly counterparts?”

“Nah,” he answered, selecting his favorite playable character, Bune. His special ability was turning into a three-headed dragon which usually meant instant victory in battle mode if you got your opponent into an enclosed space. “You just seem more into sneakers than first person shooters.”

Bune’s counterpoint was Lerajie the archer, but Abby, for some stupid reason, chose Purah, whose ability to raise the dead was useful in campaign mode but completely fucking useless in PvP. “You’re right,” she said. “But I’m up for the challenge.”

Marianne the mummy and Juan the small magical Latino cat (Damien’s favorite Juan by far) rounded out the competitors, and the bloodbath began. Damien killed everything in his path — Juan’s Paimon, who couldn’t actually move very fast on that camel; Marianne’s Vapula, who laid a remarkable number of traps to no avail; and Abby’s Purah, who was so easy to kill that she had not been exaggerating when she said she’d only played a handful of times. Every time his sin meter filled with the blood of the innocent (and his fellow Fallen, as happened in multiplayer), Damien lured someone into a dead end and transformed into a three-headed dragon, tearing his opponent apart.

Then something weird happened. Damien’s character started wandering around without his permission. “This controller is shit,” he declared after fighting with it for a full thirty seconds.

“Nah,” Abby said. “You’re just forgeting about Purah’s forgetfulness ability.”

“Shit!” Damien spat as he tried to stop Bune from walking into one of Vapula’s trip-wires. “SHIT!” he roared when Bune met a fiery end. Purah got credit for the kill, though, and for the rest of the round, Damien was mostly swearing at the screen as Abby steered him into certain death.

“You little shit!” he shrieked when the round totals scrolled across the screen.

Juan the small magical Latino cat and Marianne slunked into the background in the face of his displeasure, but Abby saluted him with the tequila bottle and a smug smile before taking a long pull of the liquor. “Best two outta three?” she asekd, swiping the back of her hand across her mouth.

Players 3 and 4 rotated throughout the night, but Damien only had his death glare on Abby. He managed to outmaneuver her in the next round, but after that, he honestly lost count. They finished the bottle of tequila, and when he was called away on Horny Coked Up Scott duty, he snagged something else (Liam was too busy sucking on the shadow kid’s face to notice — Damien secretly hoped the vampire would get fucked so good he lock all ability to evaluate the experience, but you couldn’t have everything, even if you were a prince of hell). By the time they were halfway through the whiskey he’d found, the den was deserted and the music had died out. Abby ended the round by resurrecting dead iterations of Damien’s character, who all just ran after him with daggers until he’d died of a thousand little cuts. She then flopped over dramatically on the couch. “I’m done,” she moaned. “So… so… so… drunk.”

Damien tossed his controller on the floor and wiggled himself deeper into the cushions. “I think you’re a… a fuckin’ ringer,” he slurred. He switched to a high pitch voice. “Oh I’ve never played Halo. Of I guess that was beginner’s luck. Oh I guess I just somehow have all these fucking strategies for this fucking characters that NOBODY mains as.”

Abby was giggling hard at his impression, her feet digging into his thigh. “Dude!” she gasped. “I’m a fucking valkyrie! Using the dead to fight your battles is, like, the main idea.” She went from smiling to sullen like only a drunk person can. “Not that it mattered to my sisters.”

Damien had no idea what she was talking about, but the sentiment was clear. “Fuck your goofy-ass sisters,” he declared, throwing his head back to nestle fortuitously somewhere between the back of the couch and the armrest. “Buncha fucking holier-than-thou assholes acting like they aren’t fucking battlefield scavengers out to make a fuckin’ buck…”

He trailed off, vaguely worried he’d gone too far (he was a monster, but not a fucking monster for Baphomet’s sake), but Abby was giggling again. When she calmed down, she rolled over to face the back of the couch, one wing wrapping around her, but when her feet dug into Damien’s side, he hissed and gave her a little push. “Watch the broken ribs, shitstain,” he muttered, eyelids too heavy to open in response to the (admittedly mild) pain.

“Sorry,” Abby murmured, words muffled in the cushions. “Feet are cold.”

And that was how Damien LaVey wound up passing out with Abby’s feet clutched to his crotch.

  


  


  


Abby had already left by the time Damien clawed his way back to consciousness the next day, but there was a scrap of paper tucked in his pants pocket. Took a cab home, it read in disgustingly perfect block letters. Thanks for a fun night. A.

He crumpled it in his fingers and set it on fire, letting it singe yet another hole in the cigarette-scarred couch. Rubbing at his eyes, he made his stumbly way into the huge kitchen where Polly, Brian, Miranda, and Amira were perched on counter-tops watching Vicky make pancakes. Damien gave the Frankenstein a once over; she had a significant number of bruises on her arms and bite marks on her neck, but she was grinning like an idiot.

“Hey, boo,” Polly called to him in a voice distinctly less loud than usual, a sure sign that the ghost was hungover. “You staying for post-prom pancakes?”

Damien shook his head. “I need to go home and tape my ribs,” he said. “They hurt like a motherfucker.”

“What’s the matter?” Brian teased, arm wrapped possessively around Polly’s waist. “Can’t handle getting the shit beat outta you?”

Normally Damien would have taken the excuse to burn the whole fucking house down, but today he was just too tired, so he waved off the zombie’s comment. “She took off before me, didn’t she? Probably too ashamed of her dumb raccoon face to be seen in the daylight.” He saluted the crowd with his middle finger. “Later, noobs.”

It was well into the afternoon when he pulled his bike into his garage. The Eighth Circle was having a bit of a cold snap, with the daily highs down in the 60s. Damien kind of enjoyed it — let everybody else suffer the same shitty weather he dealt with on a regular basis to go to dumb ass high school. He was starting to wonder if maybe it was time to get serious about graduating, but since graduation would mean new responsibilities here at home, he shoved the thought away with revulsion.

His dads were, as usual on Sundays, indulging their shared love of violent nature documentaries in the family room. Damien tried hard to to slink by the doorway and up the stairs to his room, and, as usual, failed. “Damian,” Lucien called without bothering to look away from the shark attack on the massive TV. “Come in here a minute.”

Damien heaved a sigh and reluctantly stomped into the room, just at the edge of Lucien’s peripheral vision. “Yeah, Pops?”

The attempt to keep his dads’ eyes off him fell through. Stan took one look at his face and barked out a laugh. “Another fight this year?” He untangled himself from Lucien’s limbs to look down at Damien, grasping his jaw in gentle claws to tilt his face from side to side. “Whoever it was got you good.”

Damien allowed himself to be handled but scowled to make it clear he didn’t like it. “She didn’t come out looking great either,” he muttered.

“So you had fun?” Lucien asked, turning away from the undersea carnage on the screen.

“It was fine.” Damien pulled his head out of Stan’s hands. “Can you quit it, Dad? I’m fine.”

Stan smiled softly, pointy canines just showing against his lips. “I haven’t seen you look this rough after a fight since your first time in the Blood Dome, so excuse me if I get a little sentimental.”

Damien made a noise somewhere between an exasperated groan and a disgusted gag. “You promised you’d never bring that up again,” he whined.

“Technically, I was the one who promised,” Lucien said, grinning, “but I wasn’t in a sealed circle at the time so…”

“No!” Damien yelled, throwing his hands up. “We are not rehashing Damien’s first trip to the Blood Dome. And I know for a fact I looked worse after that fight with Cacus. He broke four of my ribs. Abby only got two.” He paused with a hand on his side, wincing. “I think.”

Lucien’s eyes gleamed. “Abby, huh? Think she’d be interested in the fighting pits? We could use some new excitement.”

Damien scoffed. “I don’t think her kind drops into Hell for visits.”

“Oh?” Lucien’s blank red face moved in a way that suggested a raised eyebrow. “She on the lam from her ACO?”

“More like she is one,” Damien answered as he edged toward the door. “She’s a valkyrie.”

“Oh Damien,” Stan scolded. “Don’t tell me you picked a fight with an Afterlife Custody Officer while she was on duty!”

“Lucifer’s nutsack, Dad!” Damien spat. “I’m not an idiot. She goes to my school. She was there for the fucking prom.”

Lucien scrunched his face in confusion. “There’s a valkyrie at your school?”

“YEAH!” Damien roared, officially done with this dumb-ass conversation. “THERE’S A FUCKIN’ VALKYRIE AT MY SCHOOL! DIE MAD ABOUT IT!”

He set the TV on fire before storming out of the room.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Liam's deathday party, bruh!

“So?” Halcyon asked. “How was it?”

Abby rolled her eyes as she leaned back in her kitchen chair, a very large glass of water (fucking hangover) and her AP Murder homework spread out in front of her. “It was fine,” she said with a small groan.

“Did you have fun with your friends?”

“Yes, Hal.”

“Dance with anyone cute?”

He face flushed a little. “I guess.”

“Go home with anyone cute?”

Abby was shocked into silence for a moment. “Okay, A, I went to a party at Brian’s date’s house,” she said when she had gathered herself, “and B, normally parents do not pry into their children’s sex lives beyond awkward conversations about STIs and condoms, and you sure as hell covered that.” She had the 100 count box of condoms in her closet to prove it.

Hal was laughing at her. “Fine, fine,” he said, “but I want you to feel okay telling me about your friends: boyfriends, girlfriends, fuck buddies, whatever, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Abby sighed. “I hung out with Damien most of the night. We played video games. It was fun.”

“Damien the requisite high school asshole?” He was definitely still laughing at her, even if it wasn’t out loud.

“He apologized!” she insisted. “Like, specifically and meaningfully.”

“That’s good!” Halcyon replied. “Not that I’m worried. You’d never tolerate anyone who didn’t treat you right. You are your mother’s daughter, after all.”

Abby’s mood immediately fell. “She doesn’t think so,” she mumbled, furiously clicking her pen in one hand.

“Oh honey,” Halcyon said, then trailed off like he had no idea how to follow that up. Abby wasn’t surprised, given Hal’s overall inexperience at being a parent and her own abject mediocrity.

She was surprised by what Hal said next. “Your mom is being a total bitch right now,” he stated. “And so are a lot of your sisters. And I know it really sucks for you, but it also means you get to make a choice. You can use this experience to learn and grow and stack up on valkyrie points until they’re being less bitchy and give you a second chance. Or you can learn and grow and decide you want to make a new path for yourself, because fuck those bitches. You hear me, baby?”

Abby swallowed thickly. “Yeah, I hear you.” She blinked several times. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Oh god!” Halcyon moaned. “Not the D-word!” He made a gagging noise that made Abby smile. “Hey, how about you come up next weekend?” he went on. “I’ll even call the school and tell them there’s some family thing happening so you can ditch Friday.”

Abby chewed her lip. “I’ve got a big project coming up that I need to finish before next Monday.”

“Bring it with you!” Hal rebutted. “You’ll have a nice quiet place to focus on it!”

Abby snorted. “Until you get visitors.”

“I’ll put up the No Vacancy sign.”

“Ugh, fine,” Abby groaned. “You’ve talked me into it.”

“Excellent. I’ll call your school. You book your portal and ferry tickets.” Halcyon made a little noise of excitement. “It’ll be so good to see you!”

Abby rolled her eyes again. “It’s been, like, three weeks.”

“So? I’m allowed to miss my daughter.”

“Not the D-word!”

  


  


“In conclusion,” Abby said, trying to look like she was making eye contact with her classmates without actually making eye contact, “while Victor Imporious may have asserted that his misinterpretation of the oracle’s statement was his key misstep in his attempt to assassinate the high priest of the Centzontotochtin, his most fundamental mistake was assuming the deities themselves would not intervene, signifying the shifting views regarding the supernatural among humans of his era. Thank you.”

Her classmates clapped half-heartedly as she exited out of her visual aid at the teacher station and scurried back to her desk. “Way to go!” Blobert said as she sat down, giving her an encouraging smile.

“Thanks, Blobert,” she said, nerves suddenly making her voice a little shaky. She had no idea why Blobert was in AP Murder; he was too kind-hearted for even Remedial Murder.

Spending the weekend with Halcyon had actually proved to be a huge help on her failed assassination report, since he’d actually partied with the Centzontotochtin in his younger days; his insights into their interactions with their priesthood really helped put the whole thing in context. She’d still been up late the night before practicing her speech. Most of her public speaking training had been in the bardic arts rather than more mundane oratory, but she was so not coming into class with a harp and singing them a song about Victor Imporious and the Ill-Planned Poisoning.

She spent the rest of class doodling in her notebook while halfway listening to Ruth the Reaper describe the exploits of some monster hunter in the 1600s. Advanced Forbidden Languages didn’t meet on Tuesdays, and she was seriously considering ditching gym to go home early and take a nap. It wasn’t like Coach took roll ever, though she’d been warned by Oz that if you were missing too many days in a row, he would track you down and force you into a personal fitness plan. They knew from experience.

Still, one day couldn’t be so bad. She’d just go out to the bathrooms, wait for next period to be in full swing, then grab her bike and head home.

She’d made her choice by the time the bell rang. Ms. Demonslayer reminded them that they’d be getting grades on their reports at the end of the week after everyone had presented, but Abby wasn’t listening, too intent on escaping this hell hole and climbing into her nice comfy futon. Maybe she’d even see if anyone wanted to grab dinner with her later. She sent a text on her group chat with Vicky, Brian, Amira, and Oz as she hid in one of the stalls of the gigantic and also disgusting bathroom of Spooky High School. The replies came back fast.

Brian: _Workin til 6 2nite but after Oz n me r down_

Vicky: _Got a family thing :( Why arent u at gym?_

Abby: _Stayed up late workin on AP Murder shit & skippin gym. Treat yoself, right?_

Amira: _I have to cover some bitch’s shift at the restaurant. Come c me? I’ll give u the family n friends discount ;)_

Abby: _Im down. B?_

Oz: _We’ll c u at like 630?_

Abby: _[thumbs up]_

Abby put away her phone and hoisted her bag. She could hear some scuffling by the sinks and, assuming it was one of the hyenas that somehow were left roaming around school grounds, she slammed the stall door open to scare it away.

“WHAT THE FUCK!” Damien roared, spinning around to glower at her with a huge knife in his hands. “Can’t a guy sharpen his claws in peace?!”

“Shit, sorry,” Abby said quickly. This was the first time she’d been alone with Damien since prom, and she found herself even more wrong-footed than usual. “I thought you were a hyena.”

Damien’s scowl shifted suddenly into a wide grin. “Dude, being a hyena would be fucking rad! Running around, killing things, all happy and shit.”

“I’d like to be one of those panthers that climbs up in a tree and sleeps all day,” Abby said, then stifled a yawn.

The prince of hell snorted. “You would want to be in a tree.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “Holding the higher ground is warfare 101.”

“Sure,” Damien retorted, “but not at the risk of losing your ability to retreat.”

“That’s where the wings come in handy.”

“Whatever, angel cake.”

They’d been in each other’s social circles a number of times in the past week. With Scott and Vicky basically attached at the hip, Liam and Oz constantly gazing into each other’s eyes, and Brian now the tide to Polly’s moon, it was inevitable. Damien had continued the angel jokes, but they didn’t have the same barb as before. If anything, there was a kind of camaraderie in being pulled along in the wake of their friends’ romantic entanglements, like they were just watching it all happening, sports commentators on Cupid’s games.

The demon was back to picking at his nails. “Your report on Imporious wasn’t half bad, but he’s changed his tune in recent years.”

Surprised by the sudden turn in the conversation, all Abby managed to say was, “Oh?”

“Yeah, I picked him for this project a couple of years ago,” Damien explained, entirely focused on his claws. “He ended up in the Eighth Circle for that shit, so I decided to go talk to the guy. Now he’s claiming that he was right about the prophecy, but that he got sold out. Says the only time he discussed his plans was in this super secret meeting where he killed the other guy before he left. But he claims the local water spirit ratted on him to the Centzontotochtin.”

“The local water spirit?” Abby started to grin. “Let me guess: it was a hot spring.”

Damien looked up at her. “How did you know?”

She shrugged. “Insider info. Also, you’ve already taken AP Murder?”

Face dropping into a defensive sullenness, Damien replied, “Nothing that says you can’t take it multiple times. They teach different shit every year.” He flicked the butterfly knife closed. “Not to mention it helps keep my dads off my back about my fucking GPA.”

“Play to your strengths,” Abby agreed, then grimaced. “I’m doing fine with the research, but I think my grades are gonna take a hit when we get to practical application.”

“Pay me enough and I’ll do your homework for you.”

“Not just for the chance to create some more mayhem?”

Damien shrugged. “Vera keeps hounding me about not doing stuff I’m good at for free. Are we fucking skipping or not? I got crimes to do.”

“Didn’t realize I was keeping you,” Abby answered, heaving her bag onto her shoulder.

“Well somebody’s gotta protect your chicken-looking ass from the hyenas.

  


  


“Come in, sit down!” Amira’s mom ordered when Abby walked into the restaurant. “Amira said you were coming.”

“Hi, Mrs. Rashid,” Abby said, taking the chair the older jinn pointed her to at one of the few unoccupied tables. “Brian and Oz should be on their way.”

Mrs. Rashid nodded. “We’ve already got something special cooking for each of them, but what would you like?”

Abby glanced at the menu. “Lamb shawarma with tzatziki sounds really good.”

“That’s all? Nothing else?” Amira’s parents could be aggressive when it came to feeding their daughter’s friends, but Abby supposed you didn’t open a restaurant if you didn’t like feeding people.

“Some tea?”

Mrs. Rashid scrutinized her face. “You’ve got dark circles under your eyes,” she scolded. “I’ll bring you something to pep you up.”

Abby scrolled mindlessly on her phone as she waited for Oz and Brian, waving at Amira when the girl emerged from the kitchen with a full tray. After prom, Abby had somehow been roped into the WankMasterz groupchat, which seemed to be Polly’s primary forum for coordinating debauchery among her friends. The current subject of discussion was Liam’s upcoming deathday.

PollyWantsCrack: _we could crash the kentucky derby again_

PollyWantsCrack: _that was fun_

PrincessMiri: _I refuse to attend any event so blatantly anti-sea ever again_

Liam: _Miri, it was a human event_

PrincessMiri: _so? Even humans know about sea horses_

PrincessMiri: _they deliberately chose to exclude them_

Liam: _whatever_

Liam: _besides, derby crashing is so mainstream now_

SUNPUNCHER: _there’s a new club in asphodel meadows_

SUNPUNCHER: _we could check it out and then blow it up_

Vera: _I have a financial interest in that club, so I advise you to reconsider that suggestion_

SUNPUNCHER: _we could check out the new club in asphodel meadows and spend a lot of money there and then go blow up a competing club_

Vera: _better_

DeathdayDude: _ugh, no, if Vera is backing it then it also means it’s got a great PR team and everyone knows about it_

Deathday Dude: _POLLY CHANGE MY NAME BACK_

PollyWantsCrack: _I didn’t do anything_

“Hey,” Brian said as he plopped down in the chair next to her.

Abby laid her phone face down on the table. “Hey,” she said. “Where’s Oz?”

“Toilet.” Brian sighed. “They do this thing when they get nervous where they obsessively sip at some beverage for hours, and next thing you know, they’ve downed, like, three gallons of water or cranberry juice or shitty beer.”

“What’s going on?”

Brian shrugged. “They’re worried about what to get Liam for his deathday.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess it’s that awkward we-haven’t-been-dating-long-enough-for-me-to-pull-out-all-the-stops-but-I-don’t-want-you-to-think-I-don’t-care thing.”

“See?” said Brian. “It took you like three seconds. It took them my entire three hour shift to get that out.” He shrugged again. “But I guess they didn’t really ever have to put feelings into words until they started coming to school, so…”

Abby nodded. “And it’s always easier to see from the outside.”

“Yeah.”

Oz sat down with a huff, looking more boneless than usual. “I swear, I peed for a minute straight.”

“I’m not surprised,” Brian said. “Hey, Mrs. Rashid.”

“Hello Brian,” Amira’s mom said. “Hello Oz.” She began laying out an elaborate tea tray on their table. “We’ve got sheep’s brain stew going for you, ready to serve up just as soon as Amir skims the fat from the top.” She smiled at Brian. “I know you like that part.”

“Yes ma’am.” Brian beamed at her.

The fire jinn explained to Abby that she should pour herself a little tea from the small pot, taste it, then use the hot water from the larger pot to dilute it to her liking. “It’s ironwort,” she said, “to build your constitution.” She looked at Oz’s slumped form. “You could use some too,” she told them.

“Yes ma’am,” Oz said, dutifully reaching for one of the tulip-shaped glasses. Once Mrs. Rashid had departed, they looked at Abby. “So, we noticed that you and Damien were both missing from gym today. Just a coincidence, or…”

Abby crinkled her face. “Just a coincidence,” she assured, looking back and forth between them and Brian, who was looking a little smug. “I ran into him in the bathrooms. He said something about doing crimes. I went home to take a nap.”

“Uh huh,” said Brian. “So you definitely weren’t skipping together.”

“Why the hell would we be skipping together?”

“You ended up sleeping together on prom night,” Oz said. “Technically.”

Abby rolled her eyes. “We passed out on the same couch.”

“Yeah,” Brian said, “after being mortal enemies just hours before.”

She waved her tea glass carefully in dismissal, fingers holding just the rim so they didn’t get burned. “I needed a good fight. I guess he did too. He apologized for being a dick. I apologized for also kind of being a dick. Now we’re cool. That’s it.”

Amira was suddenly at their side, the smell of exotic cooking spices wafting off her work clothes. “Did you ask her yet?”

Brian nodded. “She says they weren’t skipping together.”

“Haha!” Amira crowed. “Vicky owes me five bucks. She’s always too optimistic about these things.”

“I’m sorry,” Abby said, setting her tea down. “Have you all been placing bets on me?”

“No,” Amira said. “At least, not on you in general.”

“Have you been placing debts on me hooking up with Damien?” she asked more specifically and also more indignantly.

“Yes,” Amira said, grinning widely. “Well, table two needs refills. Gotta run!” She darted away and Abby was left with only Oz and Brian. Oz looked sheepish. Brian was trying hard to look nonchalant.

“Well?” she said. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

“Look, it was really Vicky and Amira,” Oz started. “Vicky’s got this idea in her head that you and Damien would make a cute couple…”

“But Amira laughed at her and said you give off big lesbian vibes…” Brian continued.

“And then you both didn’t show up at gym today, and Vicky got all excited…”

“And Amira bet her five dollars that you were not sneaking out with Damien.”

Abby nodded slowly. “I see.” She let them sit in their discomfort for a few more seconds.

“Our friends are weird,” Brian said.

“Really, really weird,” Oz agreed.

“Vicky gets really dedicated to her friendfic headcanons.”

“And Amira is really competitive.”

“It’s cool,” Abby said, smiling. “It’s…” She searched for words. “It’s a way of making me part of your lives.” She took a sip of tea. “But, depending on the wording of the bet, Vicky may be the winner. Damien and I technically left campus together.”

Brian grinned. “Amira’s gonna flip.”

Abby grinned back. “She’s also wrong about big lesbian vibes. I’m bi.”

Oz’s eyes wrinkled in a smile. “I’m pan,” they said.

“I’m straight,” Brian said. “Just plain, ol’ boring heterosexual Brian.”

“It’s cool, dude,” Abby said. “Leaves more dicks for the rest of us that want ‘em. Now,” she said, steepling her fingers and turning to Oz, “what are we going to do about Liam’s deathday gift?”

The shadow kid slumped back again. “Fuck if I know.”

“Would it help if you stopped thinking about it as a deathday gift and started thinking about it as an I-like-you-and-want-to-share-something-with-you gift?”

Oz perked up. “Maybe?”

“Dude,” Brian said, “maybe it’s time to get out the shadow drone?”

“Mixed tapes are classic for a reason,” Abby agreed.

“Okay,” Oz said, nodding slowly. “I’ve also been wanting to show him this graphic novel series I really like, but it’s started to get kinda popular…”

“Okay, Oz,” Abby interjected. “You are a manifestation of anxiety and fear. I know you’ve got a lot of siblings, but compared to, say, the number of vampires in the universe, you’re a minority of a minority. Even if you like something that’s mainstream or whatever, your perspectives on it are pretty unique.”

“It’s like I’ve been telling you,” Brian said. “If he only likes you because you seem to like the right things, he doesn’t really like you.”

Abby nodded. “This is a chance to show him a little more of yourself. And if the way he tripped over his own feet when he saw in in the hall the other day is any indication, he really like you.”

Oz took a deep breath. “Okay,” they said. “I can do this.” He looked up from the table. “I’m gonna make him a mixed tape. And if he likes that, then maybe I’ll let him borrow my novels.”

Mrs. Rashid bustled in with a tray of food. “And if he’s mean to you,” she said as she dropped big bowls of a viscous, burgundy stew in from of them, “you just let me and Amir know. Even vampires burn.”

  


  


“Bro!” Scott exclaimed. “This is gonna be so much fun!”

Damien rolled his eyes, definitely not feeling Scott’s level of enthusiasm. Karaoke was lame as hell in his book, but it was Liam’s deathday party and Polly had promised him all the free sangria he could drink, which was the only reason he was currently standing in the karaoke bar the ghost had bought out for the event.

“How did you afford this, Polly?” he asked as Scott scrambled over himself to greet his girlfriend, who had just come in with Amira and Abby. “This place is swank.”

“Actually, Vera’s footing the bill,” the ghost explained as she put the finishing touches on Liam’s deathday boy seat of honor, complete with paper crown. “Something about karaoke making for great blackmail material. And the only way to get Miranda to come was to tell her there’d be appropriate silverware, so we had to come to the nice karaoke bar instead of the shithole I usually go to.”

Damien flipped resentfully through the song book. “Liam doesn’t seem like the karaoke type.”

“Oz talked him into it,” Polly said brightly. “They told him it’s, like, the ultimate form of self-immolation while simultaneously being the ultimate form of cultural pastries. Or something like that. I was really high at the time.”

“Self-humiliation and cultural pastiche,” the shadow kid corrected shyly from where they had just materialized in the room. “Vera and Liam are almost here.”

Polly squealed and wrapped Oz in a tight hug. “This is going to be so much fun!”

Damien scoffed loudly. “Why do people keep saying that?” he roared.

“I dunno,” Abby replied, snatching the song book purposefully out of his hands. “Maybe because karaoke is fun as balls.” She stalked away with the book and a handful of those little slips of paper for writing down song requests.

“Yeah, well, maybe not all of us enjoy balls as much as you do,” Damien shot back.

“Your loss, then.” Abby didn’t even look up to see his glare, so he grabbed a pitcher of sangria from a startled waiter. If he was doing fucking karaoke, he needed to be drunk. Very drunk.

Once the guest of honor arrived, the real entertainment for the night was announced. “Everyone,” Polly called over the microphone, “we all know that we’re here tonight to celebrate the least likable of vampires, Liam de Lioncourt. I mean, this is a guy only a manifestation of chronic anxiety and existential fear can love!”

Damien rolled his eyes at the terrible attempt at humor, but Brian was snorting into his hand next to him.

“So because this is Liam’s day, we’re doing karaoke Liam’s way: IRONICALLY!” Polly cheered. “If our deathday boy judges your performance to be inappropriately unironic, you take a shot of toilet wine!”

Damien grinned widely. He enjoyed watching the suffering of others, and Polly’s toilet wine was suffering at its finest.

The KJ already had “Tik Tok” ready and Polly twerked her way through the pop hit. Liam gave her a thumbs down when it was (blessedly) over and the ghost enthusiastically downed a shot of her home brew.

The night devolved drunkenly from there. Vicky coaxed a very confused Scott into a hilarious rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Brian performed “Hurt” while repeatedly stabbing himself with a fork. Miranda’s singing serf gave a touching rendition of “It’s in His Kiss.” Miranda’s drinking serf was sentenced to two shots of toilet wine. Miranda’s current suitor sang “Your Body Is a Wonderland” while gazing longingly into the princess’s eyes. He was also sentenced to toilet wine and Damien stabbed him because fuck John Mayer. After the suitor had been removed from the room and probably taken to a hospital or whatever, Amira nudged his arm and held out a little piece of paper for him to read; he had to squint hard to do it — he’d finished, like, three pitchers of sangria, including eating all the little fruit bits because he wasn’t a fucking floppy ball sac — then grinned maniacally and nodded. The two fo them made a duet out of “We Are Young,” progressively setting more things in the room on fire.

After the song was over and the manager had escorted them to another, less burned lounge (all the while sending nervous glances Vera’s way), Liam announced, “I should make you drink the whole bottle of toilet wine for making me smell that yeti waiter you set on fire… but I have to admire your commitment to literalism.”

Damien smirked at Amira, who gave him a high-five.

Abby went next with a song Damien didn’t recognize.

_When we swam our love to pieces  
We washed up on messy beaches_

Damn. The girl actually had a set of pipes on her. She wasn’t as good as Miri’s singing serf, but it was way better than anything else Damien had heard tonight (excluding the roaring of a blazing inferno).

_You cleaned dry, I would not drift yet_  
_I should drink salt water to forget_  
_Oh why, oh why, oh why won’t you sing_

Then something happened. Abby’s wing fluttered just a hair as her hips began to sway.

_Bring your hips to me_  
_Bring your hips, oh oh_  
_Bring your hips to me_

Her body became all curves, from the lift of the corners of her lips to the roundness of her breasts to the slide of her thighs against each other, all of it framed by the soft wave of feathers.

_Well once I arrived, but you would not receive me_ , she pleaded.  
_I wanted it all but you could not tell  
So I paid expensive attention to detail  
The fall of your face, the wish of the well_

Damien’s mouth was dry.

_Bring your hips to me_ , she sang, reaching out with one hand and curling her fingers seductively, and Damien couldn’t stop himself from imagining them wrapping around his cock.

He was startled out of his fantasy by an elbow in his side; Polly was grinning at him smugly. “Pretty hot, huh?” she whispered in his ear.

Damien sat back, spreading his legs and crossing his arms over his chest to display his clear lack of boner. (Nevermind that he had shifted said boner into a non-phallic form.) “I guess,” he muttered aloofly, “if you’re into the whole seductive siren schtick.”

Polly laughed at him and drifted away, and Damien focused on keeping his tongue in his mouth as he watched the valkyrie finish her performance.

_All my love I don’t deny_ , she crooned, dragging her hands up her thighs and hips,  
_When they place their hands on both my sides_

What the hell had happened? Abby was cute, for sure, but Damien had never seen her exude this kind of sensuality before, not even when they’d been fighting. Or had she? He’d assumed that his hard-on had just been about a good brawl, but maybe there’d been more to it?

_Why, oh why, oh why won’t you sing?_

Abby let the last note trail out, gazing forlornly into Damien’s eyes, then, just like that, her wings were folded neatly and her previous sex appeal was replaced by her usual easy stance, alluring smile twisted into a confident smirk.

“A parody of mainstream sexiness set to a decently obscure band,” Liam appraised. “Not bad.”

Abby gave a little bow, then said, “I think you’ve had enough to drink to appreciate my deathday gift to you.” She whipped up her hand to show a sizable selection of paper slips. “A carefully curated list of 80s pop hits selected for each member of the party.”

“Oooh!” Polly shrieked. “It’s not karaoke until you break out the 80s hits!”

“Exactly,” Abby agreed. “No one sees their selection until they’re on the stage. No singing serfs. No deathday boy exceptions.”

Miranda pouted while Liam drunkenly contemplated Abby’s offering, but Damien was too busy wondering why he couldn’t stop staring at Abby’s hips now that they weren’t gyrating.

“Very well,” the vampire declared after an extended pause. “I accept your gift. But it will only be fair if everyone you’ve selected a song for also gets to select a song for you.”

Liam looked like he was trying to be sly, which he often tried when he’d been drinking, but if he was hoping to get Abby to back down, he failed. The valkyrie grinned tightly, and Damien felt his erstwhile pussy flood with heat. “Bring it on,” she said, eyes gleaming.

Damien grabbed the nearest alcoholic beverage and chugged it down. It was going to be a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, there's a lot of shitty things in the world right now, so I'm just gonna go ahead and tell you that the next chapter opens with Damien calling his dads while completely shit-faced.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm getting this up a little later than I meant to, but because I live in Oklahoma and because Trump is holding a rally here this weekend and because local public health officials anticipate that rally being a super-spreader event for coronavirus, I had to spend an inordinate amount of time today stocking up on cat food and beer and boxed mac n cheese so my partner and I don't have to leave the house for a couple of weeks just in case. Hooray, pandemic!
> 
> Anyway, as promised, Ocelost Theater presents: Damien Drunk-Dials His Dads...

Lucien LaVey was driven from a very pleasant dream about immolating Ogeron the Onerous, king of the Third Circle and a demon he’d hated since they were boys together at Baphomet’s knee, by the jangling sound of his phone ringing. He slapped in its general direction until his hand landed on the vibrating rectangle, eyes opening blearily to see Damien’s picture on the screen. “‘Lo,” he croaked, sitting up and trying to drive the sleep from his mind because apparently his son needed him. “Damien?”

“Sssshit,” his son slurred. “Pops? Is that you?”

“Yes, Dami. Is everything alright?”

“Sssshit,” Damien repeated. “Can you… can you put Dad on?”

Stan was already awake beside him, flicking on a lamp. Lucien flinched at the sudden brightness and handed the phone over. “I think he’s drunk,” he told his husband.

“Damien?” Stan said, holding the phone between them so Lucien could still hear. “Are you alright?”

“Hey… Dad…” Damien trailed off, apparently distracted by a loud crash in the background. “Can you assholes keep it down?!” he yelled. “I’m talking to my dad. You know, the lord of hell?”

“Tell Stan I said hi!” Polly screamed.

“Polly says hi,” Damien said.

“Yes, I can hear that,” Stan said calmly. “Damien, where are you?”

“Liam’s deathday party!” His son paused, then went on. “I think I need a ride.” He paused again. “I think we all need rides?”

“I think that sounds like a good idea,” Stan said. Lucien was already leaning over him to grab his phone, thumbing open the app for their limo service. “Just tell me where you are.”

“Uh… karaoke?”

“Okay. Do you remember the name of the place?”

“Fuck no. Vera rented it.”

“Okay, we’ll use the GPS tracker on your phone to get an address and send the limos.”

“Ugh, I can’t believe you still have a tracker on my phone like I’m twelve.”

“Well,” Stan said, massaging his temples with one hand, “at times like this it comes in handy.”

“Whatever.”

Lucien pulled up the tracking app and sent the address to the limo service. “How many people are at the party?” he asked into the phone’s mic.

“Ffffuck,” Damien said, and Lucien could just picture unfocused eyes drifting around a room trying to do something as complicated as counting. “I think we can fit in one limo?”

“I’ll send two.”

“Damien,” Stan said, “does anyone need to go to the hospital?”

“Just Miri’s stupid prince, but someone already called him an Uber hours ago.”

“So nobody’s throwing up uncontrollably?”

“Uh…” Again, unfocused eyes scanned a room. “Nah. Just wasted.”

“The limo service is going to have a hard time making sure everybody gets to the right houses,” Lucien cut in, “so I’m just gonna tell them to take you all to Polly’s, okay?”

“Rad. Deathday sleepover.”

“That’s right,” Stan said. “Did Liam have a good deathday?”

“He’s making out with his boy? Girl? Joyfriend. He’s making out with his joyfriend.”

“That sounds like a good deathday then.”

“Yeah.”

“The limos are on the way,” Lucien said, “so you should all head outside to meet them, okay?”

“Kay, Pops. HEY, ASSHOLES! GO OUTSIDE! LIMOS ARE COMING!”

“Do you need anything else, Dami?” Stan asked.

“Nah.”

“Okay, well, call us when you wake up tomorrow, okay? I’ll send you a text to remind you.”

“Kay, Dad. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Lucien flopped back on the bed. Stan reached across him to return his phone to its place. “I keep thinking that, one day, he’s gonna grow up,” Lucien muttered.

“Oh come on,” Stan said. “Asking for help? Asking us for help? I think that counts as growing up.”

“True.” The idea that Damien would call them in the middle of the night to ask for a ride while drunk off his ass would have been completely unthinkable a few years back. “I still don’t know why he called me and asked for you.”

Stan shrugged. “Maybe it was some subconscious ploy to talk to both of us.” The blue demon rolled onto his side toward Lucien and ran a single claw up his flank. “But now that we’re both awake?”

Lucien turned his head sharply. “Is there something I can help you with, Stan?” he asked, eyes narrowing.

“Yeah,” Stan said. “You can roll over so I can fuck you.”

His cock was already giving its answer, but Lucien pretended to consider the request. “It’s really late…”

Stan’s hand slid up the inside of his thigh.

“And I have an early meeting with Bernice the Formless…”

Stan’s nails raked the crease between leg and ball sack.

Lucien suddenly guffawed. “Oh fuck! What if Damien knew that him calling us in the middle of the night would mean this! Can you imagine the look on his face?”

Stan twisted his features into a Damien-like snarl. “Ugh, gross. Can’t you two just, like, not?” he said, pitching his voice in a parody of their son.

Lucien devolved into giggles, and Stan used the moment of distraction to clamp his cock and balls tightly between thumb and forefinger, squeezing hard enough the pleasure was edged with pain, and Lucien’s laughter turned into a moan. “Now that you’ve had your fun,” Stan growled, “roll over so I can fuck you.”

“Yes sir,” Lucien said obediently.

  


  


  


One of the worst things about starting at a new school halfway through the semester was that right around the time you had figured out who was who and what was where, it was time for finals. Spooky High scheduled its breaks around the solar calendar, a week for each equinox and a month for each solstice, and as she dragged herself back to the land of the living from hangover hell following Liam’s deathday party, Abby was unhappy to see that exams would be beginning in three weeks.

She was even more unhappy when, Monday morning, Mrs. Pantera pulled her aside at the end of Curses II. “Just for a little chat,” she said. “I’ve already let Mr. Stopheles know you’ll be late for Ruthless Rhetoric.”

“Okay,” Abby said, sinking down in the desk in the front of the room.

“Now, as SHS’s young monster development specialist, I’ve been talking with your other teachers about how you’ve been doing in your classes so far.” Mrs. Pantera smiled broadly, showing exactly how much larger her canines were than the rest of her teeth. “We need to figure out what classes to sign you up for next semester, after all.”

“Oh. Right.” Abby hadn’t thought about next semester at all. She hadn’t even thought about summer break.

“Now, you’re doing just fine in this class,” the werepanther went on, “and Professor Cruach said he didn’t think you’d have any trouble passing the Forbidden Languages final. Mr. Stopheles couldn’t say anything for certain until he finished grading the recent round of essays. Something about trade agreements?” Mrs. Pantera gave Abby a questioning look, still smiling widely, like she wanted the valkyrie to say something.

“Yeah,” Abby said slowly. “I wrote about leveraging cultural capital among groups with deep ideological roots in exchange for material goods with a focus on the relationship between nature spirits and human eco-terrorist organizations.”

“Very interesting!” the teacher exclaimed. “Is that something that interests you?”

Abby shrugged. “Kinda. I guess.”

Mrs. Pantera nodded. “I see.” She shuffled some papers in front of her. “Well, Mr. Stopheles seemed to think that, if you did well on your essay, you’d have an excellent chance of passing his class. And now for a bit of bad news.” She twisted her lips into a more sympathetic moue. “Ms. Demonslayer said that she would not at all be comfortable passing you in AP Murder.”

Abby’s slouched. “Yeah, I kinda figured.” She’d gotten a good grade on her speech, but she was still struggling with the practical application work. In fact, she had a string of zeros because she hadn’t actually managed to commit even one murder. “I guess I need to go back to, what? Murder I?”

“Ms. Demonslayer seems to think you have the potential to perform up to AP standards,” Mrs. Pantera said. “She said that she would be willing to give you an incomplete for the course and work with you on an independent study next semester to make up the credit. Is that something you’d be interested in?”

Abby chewed her lip thoughtfully. “I’ll have to think about it,” she said finally. “And maybe talk to Ms. Demonslayer?”

Mrs. Pantera beamed. “I think that’s an excellent idea!” She bustled around with her papers until she had a new sheet in front of her. “Now, it’s standard for all students to take at least three semesters of Civics — Mr. Taur has refused to divide his course into different levels and teaches something different as he pleases — so we’ll start you there. Is there anything else from the course listings that you’re interested in?”

“Professor Cruach mentioned that I might like Sacred Geometry?” Abby said.

Mrs. Pantera nodded enthusiastically, scratching down something on the paper. “And Mistress Tyrsenis will be offering it in the fall, though you should be forewarned that she always ends up roping her students into numerology as well.”

Abby shrugged. “That sounds okay.”

“Alright,” Mrs. Pantera looked up expectantly, pen poised in claws. “Anything else strike your fancy?”

“Not really. I guess I should try to get a science credit out of the way?”

“Ms. Feratu is offering Anatomy and Physiology.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Mrs. Pantera wrote something else down, consulted a chart at her side — probably the block schedule for next term — then scratched out something on the paper and wrote something else. “If you do the independent study with Ms. Demonslayer, you still have one slot to fill.” She ran her claw down a list. “You’ll still have fourth and fifth block open, so you could either fill an art credit by working on next semester’s theater production or you could take history with Sagacious-sensei. I believe he’s focusing on a history of warfare in the fall.”

Abby weighed her options. She’d had enough history of warfare to make her want to barf at the thought of another lecture on the Peloponnese, but that also meant it would be a piece of cake. On the other hand, getting lured into the school play sounded like a nightmare only a fear entity like Oz could cause. “History,” she said, trying to smile a little.

Mrs. Pantera smiled even more widely at this show of friendliness and jotted it down on her form. “Well then,” she said, “we’ll just have to run this course list by your father, but I think you’ve got a good fall planned out. Now, you better get to Rhetoric, and don’t forget to talk to Ms. Demonslayer!”

Amira gave her a look when she slipped into Mr. Stopheles’s class, but Abby ignored her to take notes, being even more detailed than usual now that she knew she actually had a chance of passing. “Where were you?” the fire jinn asked as they headed down to lunch. A particular gleam appeared in her eye. “Not skipping with Damien again, I hope.”

Abby rolled her eyes. “Mrs. Pantera wanted to talk about my schedule for next semester,” she said. “And I thought Vicky was the one with all the friend-fic fantasies.”

“That was before I found out you swing both ways.”

“And suddenly you’re a Dabby shipper too?”

“ _Dabby_?” Amira cackled, voice flying up another octave. “ _Dabby_?”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Abby snapped back, stalking toward their usual table. Brian was already there, staring into the depths of Mephistophelinda’s black-eye peas. They stared back. Abby made a point of not making eye contact as she passed. “Do you prefer Abmien?”

“That sounds like a muscle relaxer,” Brian said, “but one that only works on your abs.”

Amira laughed even harder.

“What are you even talking about?” Brian asked Abby.

Abby didn’t look at either of them as she pulled a sandwich and mass of apple slices out of her school bag. “Amira’s ragging me about Damien again.”

The zombie grunted, and Abby was relieved he didn’t have his own two cents to add. “What’re you all taking next semester?” she asked, eager to steer the conversation away from… wherever it was it had gone.

Vicky and Scott joined them as they compared class schedules. “Why are you even talking about fall?” Vicky asked. “It’s ages away.”

“I know,” Abby said morosely. “I should be focusing on finals. And figuring out if there’s any way to salvage my Murder grade,” she muttered.

“That’s what you get for being a huge nerd,” Amira said. “Bit off more than you could chew.”

“I don’t even know why my dad signed me up for that class,” Abby said, then grimaced. “Actually, no, I can make a few guesses. He’s always had some weird ideas about what things are actually like where I grew up.”

“He’s never been there?” Vicky asked.

Abby shook her head. “He’s not allowed. None of my mom’s former lovers are allowed in Folkvangr.” Her face twisted up. “Except her brother.”

“Right,” said Vicky after a beat, “I’m going to breeze right past that incest there and point out that what we should really be focusing on is our plans for summer vacation!”

“Yeah!” Scott agreed. “Summer vacation! I don’t have sports-ball practice for four whole weeks, so I want to go catch balls somewhere that isn’t school!”

Abby had just remembered that, generally speaking, incest was taboo or at least too kinky to discuss over lunch (even at Spooky High) and pretended to fumble in her bag for something until her face didn’t feel like a raging inferno.

“I’m gonna be working,” Amira said, clearly pouting.

“Me too,” Brian said.

“Yeah, but you aren’t going to work four weeks straight,” Vicky countered.

“Have you even met my parents?”

“Yes, I have,” Vicky said prissily, “and I think I have accrued enough charm points to persuade them that my summer break won’t be complete without camping on the beach with my bffs.”

Abby popped back up to see Amira and Vicky eying each other, but it was Amira that broke into a grin. “Hell yeah, beach trip!”

Brian groaned. “Again? Last time I was spitting up sand for weeks.”

“This time we won’t bury you,” Vicky said. “Promise.”

He looked at her skeptically, but it was hard to say no to those big blue eyes. “Fine,” he said, “but I want Oz and Amira to promise too.”

Amira scoffed. “Fuck, whatever, I promise.”

The zombie nodded, then looked around. “Where is Oz, anyway?”

“Pretty sure he and Liam are making out in the basement computer lab,” Vicky said.

Brian sighed. “Of course they are.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Do you think they’re gonna want to invite Liam?”

Vicky blushed slightly. “Well, I kinda already invited Scott.”

Scott wagged his tail. “My grandma makes the best s’mores ingredients!” he said enthusiastically, then cocked his head. “Though I still don’t how she seals the marshmallows in a plastic bag with no openings…”

Brian hummed in acknowledgment, still looking at the ceiling. “Do you think maybe Polly would want to come?” he asked finally.

“Tell her its a beachside rave and she’ll show up with bells on,” Amira said, “and nothing else.”

Brian swallowed visibly. “Then maybe I’ll invite her.”

“Yeah!” Vicky said. “The more the merrier! Should we go back to Big Crab Cove?”

Amira looked at the other girl in horror. “Did you forget about the big crabs?”

“Well, yes, there were crabs, _but_ there were also lots of great camp sites.”

Abby listened with half an ear as they debated the relative merits of beaches they’d visited in years past. She hadn’t thought much about what she wanted to do with her summer break. Hal would likely want her to come visit him, but after a few days, she’d be annoyed with the stream of visitors and parties and he’d be annoyed with her lack of interest in meeting and getting to know perfect strangers and they’d both realize that they didn’t actually know how to get along with each other. The three weeks before she’d moved to Monstropolis had bounced between sometimes a little happy and depressing and awful.

One week, she decided. She’d visit Halcyon for one week, tops. The rest of the break… well, she’d figure something out.

  


  


  


Damien was skipping Civics to play FoF — which was kind of like Civics if you really thought about it — but he was sidetracked when he saw Abby at one of the library’s tables. “Sup, noob,” he greeted her, lounging casually like he hadn’t been masturbating furiously to fantasies of her for the past week.

“Hey Damien,” she replied, barely glancing up from the book in front of her. The prince of hell took a gander at the title, then made a face. “Why are you reading Frederico Maltova’s _Cultures of Hell_? That guy almost got more shit wrong that Dante.”

Abby dropped the book and rubbed her eyes. “I’m trying to get started on this stupid Civics project.”

“The report on family structures?” Damien vaguely remembered Mr. Taur outlining the assignment. “It’s due already?”

“Next Monday.” The valkyrie scribbled idly in her open notebook.

“Oh.” That was, like, four days away. Damien’s eyebrows twisted in confusion. “Why are are you working on it now?”

Abby’s wings fluffed up defensively. “Because I’ve got time to kill before Forbidden Languages, and I don’t even have a topic.”

Damien rolled his eyes. “That’s because you got a dumb assignment. Families in hell are boring.”

“What did you get?” Abby asked.

“European-based pantheons. I’ll probably throw together something about incest and all that shit.”

Abby’s face got pink all of a sudden and she made a vague noise of acknowledgment as she pulled out another book from the stack at her side. It took Damien a second to figure out why, but when he did, he couldn’t stop the leer that broke out. “Valkyries are part of the Scandinavian pantheon. You wouldn’t know anything about incest, would you?”

“Only that it happens from time to time,” Abby replied archly, refusing to make eye contact. Damien shrugged and started to abandon her in favor of an epic battle royale, but she said suddenly, “You have two dads, right?”

“Yeah,” he answered, turning back to her and shoving his hands deep in his pockets and hating the way his stomach dropped because she wanted to keep talking to him. “What about it?”

“I don’t want to make any assumptions about their, uh, equipment,” she said carefully, “but were you adopted?”

“Nah, they got a surrogate from the Seventh Circle.”

Abby frowned. “A demon from the the Seventh Circle.”

“Fuck no!” Damien said, propping himself on the edge of the table. “One of the Sodomites.”

“Odin’s balls, Damien!” she snapped, horrified. “You’re not torturing people for butt sex, are you?!”

The Librarian, an aging witch with a foul temper, shushed them loudly, but Damien couldn’t stop laughing because Abby had actually yelled “butt sex” in the library. “Hell no,” he explained once he’d caught his breath. “I mean, they still get called ‘The Sodomites’ because it’s, like, tradition, but they’re all rapists and shit like that. Hell is very pro-butt sex, so long as it’s consensual.”

Abby was still frowning, but she seemed less alarmed. “So you’re half-human?”

It was Damien’s turn to look alarmed. “No. Just… no. A damned human soul carried fetal me as part of its punishment, but I’m entirely made up of my dads.”

“So damned rapists often carry demon children for same-sex couples?”

The demon huffed. “I mean, yeah, I guess. I think you have to, like, apply for a license and pay an upkeep fee for the gestation period?”

“Does everyone that applies get accepted?” Abby asked, leaning forward on the table in a way that made her breasts look amazing. “Or is there some competition?”

Damien growled in frustration. “I don’t fucking know, okay? What’s with all the fucking questions anyway?”

Abby sank back, face dropping. “Just an idea for my project, that’s all.”

Annoyance at being interrogated warred with the strong desire to keep talking to her — since when did he actually want to talk to anybody? He hadn’t felt this kinda nauseated/itchy/hypersensitive/almost-happy combo since… since…

Fuck.

Nope, not going there again.

No way.

It had sucked the luminous balls of the Archangel Michael.

It had eaten the slimy cunt of Grendel’s grandmother.

Abby had pretty eyes. The brown eyeliner brought out the warm tones in the irises.

So what if he like hanging out with her? Polly and Vera and Liam were hot too and he liked hanging out with them. It didn’t mean anything.

Besides, he’d learned his lesson, right?

Heaving a sigh, Damien pulled out his phone, gesturing for Abby to stay put. He got an answer after only three rings. “Hey, Dad,” he said, putting on the utterly bored tone he used to keep his dads out of his business. It never worked. “A friend is working on a school project about Hell and she’s got all these questions about the Sodomite surrogates and shit and I was wondering if she could just come over and ask you and Pops about it.”

“Certainly!” Stan replied, all fucking enthusiasm because it was a school thing. “Invite her for dinner tomorrow night. Will she need to damn her soul?”

“Uh…” Damien glanced at Abby. “She can get through with an ACO license, right?”

“The valkyrie, then? Yeah, the license should be fine.”

“Cool. Later.” He hung up before Stan could say anything more. Sometimes talking to him made Damien wanted to punch himself in the face. Like, how could a king of hell be so aggressively basic?

“You’re coming to my house for dinner tomorrow night,” he told Abby, who was watching him with a confused and worried look on her face. “You can ask my dads all the dumb questions you want.”

For a moment, all that happened was Abby’s eyebrows moving slowly up her forehead. “Dinner… with the kings of the Eight Circle of Hell…” she said slowly.

Damien waved off her trepidation. “You tell ‘em it’s for school and they’ll pull out their own embarrassing baby photos. Just, ya know, don’t be an asshole guest.”

“Okay…” The valkyrie seemed to take a moment to process the situation, then nodded her head. “Okay,” she said more firmly, holding up a finger. “One problem: I don’t have an ACO license.”

“You don’t?” Damien titled his head to the side. “I thought valkyries were all ACOs.”

Abby looked down at her hands. “Not all, okay?”

“Uh, shit, okay.” It was clear from the way she had her shoulders hunched and her wings pulled close that Abby was not interested in going into details, so Damien dropped it. “Well, you’ll need to damn your soul then. It’s just an arbitrary thing,” he added when she looked up, eyes wide. “It doesn’t actually have any bearing on your afterlife placement. It’s mostly a way to keep sanctimonious assholes out of our parties.”

“I…” Abby started, then paused to swallow. “I’ll have to think about it.”

Damien scowled, mood dropping faster than a failed rocket launch. He should have known someone like Abby would never want to come home with him. “Whatever,” he said, pushing off the table hard enough to shift it a couple of inches. “Do what you fucking want.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may, in fact, be someone who says "butt sex" an inappropriate volumes in inappropriate places, but it's usually because I'm nerding out about what an ancient dream interpretation guide can tell us about common sexual practices in Hellenistic Greek society.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler alert: I don't like White supremacists and neither does my OC.

Abby biked home slowly after Forbidden Languages, taking her time in the lingering light and coolness of the May evening. _You’ll solve two birds with one stone_ , she told herself. _Get a good grade on your Civics project and maybe finally get over your hangup about killing people so you can maybe actually one day pass AP Murder._ She’d talked to Ms. Demonslayer, and the Murder teacher had been quite clear that she believed Abby’s low grades on the practical application homeworks were the result of a mental block rather than laziness or a lack of skill. “We just need to get you more comfortable with the idea of murder,” she said, smiling gently. “And I think working one-on-one might be the best way to do that.”

Abby couldn’t really fault Ms. Demonslayer’s logic, but the teacher didn’t seem to realize that it was nurture just as much as nature: in Folkvangr, killing people in combat was noble, but just coming up behind someone and stabbing them? Utter cowardice.

Not that Abby had ever actually killed anyone period. Another black mark against her among the valkyries. 

She maneuvered her bike into the little shed in the back of the apothecary and chained it up, sighing heavily as she considered her options. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so bad if she killed someone that actually deserved it? Or maybe if it actually happened in combat? But she wasn’t sure that killing in combat even counted when it came to damning one’s soul. The Eighth Circle was the circle of fraud, after all, and there’s was nothing fraudulent about combat to the death.

Unless there was something less than straightforward about the afterlife…

Perhaps if her combatant were lured into fighting with the promise of an afterlife that they couldn’t possibly hope to achieve…

Abby’s face broke into a grin as she came up with an idea would have tickled even Loki Liesmith’s fancy.

She ran up the stairs to her apartment and threw her school bag onto the futon. There was a battered wooden chest in the corner that she hadn’t opened since she’d arrived in Monstropolis, but she pried open the latch now and pulled well-oiled leather armor from folds of waxed canvas. The scent of it brought intense memories of Sessumnir’s training salle with its high oak beams and its wall of mirrors and her sisters sparring around her. For a moment, she was almost paralyzed by home-sickness; her throat closed against the sensation of grief rising up her throat, and she swallowed heavily. Wrestling the feeling into a shoebox in the furthest recesses of the closet of her mind, Abby stripped off her regular clothes and donned the reindeer tunic, which wrapped around her body and came almost to her knees, and the thick woolen leggings. She wrapped her shins and forearms in thick leather greaves and vambraces. Last was a round-capped helmet with a spectacle guard around the eyes and over the nose; the woolen padding lining the inside made it a snug fit over her hair.

Abby surveyed herself in a mirror, then nodded. She certainly looked the part.

Even further in the chest, Abby found her short sword and seax, both polished to a fine sheen. She didn’t anticipate having any use for them, but the Allfather had always warned against leaving your weapons behind. Which was why she routinely took a couple of knives to school.

Strapping her sword belt around her waist, Abby strode into the gloaming. Pausing on the landing just outside her apartment door, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and spread her wings a little to let the breeze comb through her feathers. Then she opened an inner set of ears that she had carefully plugged since leaving her home and listened for the prayers of mortals.

“There’s some things you need to know,” Kara had said to her as Abby had packed her trunks with the few items she really felt were her own. “Things about how things are out there in the real world.”

Abby hadn’t looked at her. She couldn’t or she’d start crying.

“More people have been worshiping the Allfather in the past decade,” Kara went on, likely trying to avoid the emotional minefield of the situation as well. “But a lot of those people have started because of some racist idea that Odinism is the traditional religion of white people.”

Abby actually had looked at her then. “But I thought that there were still believers, like true believers…”

“There are,” Kara agreed. “There’s some who came to Odin through a desire to live more in-tune with the natural world and natural cycles. They hold the rites and practice the seidr and work the runes because it gives them a greater sense of connectedness with the web of everything.” Then she grimaced. “But then there’s this new group who just want an excuse to be violent and boorish and hateful, and they do it in the Allfather’s name.”

Abby screwed up her face. “Gross.”

“Yeah,” Kara said. The older valkyrie sighed. “I’m telling you this because, here in Vanaheim, we’re insulated from the prayers of mortals. I mean, even the gods need to be able to get away for a while. But when you’re down there, you’ll hear them, loud and clear. And while some of those prayers will be in earnest, a lot with be bigoted bullshit. Best to just not deal with any of it.”

Abby had shrugged. It wasn’t surprising that they didn’t want her mucking about in anything close to the gods’ business.

“I’m gonna teach you a trick to block it all out,” Kara said, “so you can, ya know, go to school and do regular kid shit and whatever.” Her older sister had smiled. “You deserve a chance to have some fun.”

Abby had known it was supposed to be some small comfort, but it just made her depressed. Still, Kara hadn’t been kidding about how loud the prayers could get once you were on the mortal plane, and Abby had made good use of Kara’s technique for blocking it all out.

But now, she wanted to hear the prayers, and in particular she wanted to hear the bigoted bullshit prayers. She listened carefully and intently as pleas to the Allfather and Thor, to Frigg and Freyja, even to Loki Liesmith and Heimdallr drifted through her head. It didn’t take long to find a good one.

“Thor, when I would hold back, let me advance,” a man’s voice prayed. “When I would be weak, help me be strong. Teach me, elder brother, to throw my own hammer and slay the giants who oppose my will and the trample upon my people.”

With a powerful push of her wings, Abby took to the air. The supplicant wasn’t far, in a human city down the coast from Monstropolis, which was good, because Abby was still a weak flyer and hadn’t made time to practice recently. She followed the prayer like a migrating bird following a magnetic map, relying on an internal sense of space instead of sight or sound. Over a field of city lights, she homed in on a single house, spiraling down through the shadows to land in a small backyard. A word in the Allspeak opened the lock on the back door, and Abby strode into a den. The large window that faced the back of the house was covered with a black sheet, and she quickly saw why: the room was wallpapered in white supremacists paraphernalia, from swastikas to Confederate flags, from a poster for the band Bound for Glory (with Thor’s hammer iconography) to the 14 words painted in beautiful calligraphy and framed in solid wood. There were even a couple of tiki torches leaning in the corner.

Abby smiled a tight smile. Jackpot.

“Hail, friend!” she called loudly, drawing on some of her semi-divine power to project her voice. “Your prayers have been heard.”

She waited. Overhead, she heard scuffling feet and, she was fairly certain, the sound of a rifle being cocked. She struck a pose as footsteps pounded down stairs and a shadow moved in the room beyond the den’s doorway. “Who the fuck are you?” the man snapped.

“You pray to Thor, yet you don’t know one of the valkyries of Valhalla when you see them?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow. He wouldn’t be able to see it, but it was important to really play the part. “Perhaps I’ve been sent in error.”

“Bitch, you better get out of my house—”

“The Allfather wouldn’t be pleased to hear of your inhospitable treatment of guests,” Abby interjected. “Why don’t you turn on the light so you can see exactly who you are dealing with.”

The shadow crept closer, rifle leveled in Abby’s general direction, but she wasn’t worried. A bullet would hurt like hell, but unless it’d had some serious arcane buffs added, it wouldn’t do much damage. She didn’t blink when the light came on, though the man in front of her narrowed his eyes at the new brightness, then widened them again as the barrel of his gun dipped toward the ground. “Holy shit,” he whispered, eyes darting left and right to take in her wings. “Are you really…”

Abby nodded as he trailed off. “As I said, your prayers have been heard.”

To his credit, he didn’t lose his footing, even as his body sagged a little against the wall. “I never thought…” he started, then swallowed. “To have you here… it’s an honor.”

“Yes, it is,” Abby agreed. “Tell me your name, supplicant of Thor.”

“Matthew Langmore,” the man said. He was probably in his mid-2os, with brown hair in an undercut and a patchy attempt at a beard. “Son of Donald,” he added.

Abby nodded as though he’d followed the right protocol. “Your loyalty to your people has not gone unnoticed,” she said, waving a hand around the room to make it clear exactly which people she meant. “I have come to offer you a proposition. As you most likely know, the valkyries are sent to the battlefields of Earth to collect the souls of true warriors and escort them to Valhalla or Folkvangr, where the armies of the Allfather train in preparation for Ragnarok.”

Matthew nodded. “You separate the worthy from the unworthy,” he added, as though he was quoting scripture, probably the one where Jesus said something about separating the sheep from the rams.

“Indeed.” Abby took a breath, preparing her words carefully. “Occasionally, the gods take interest in individual mortals. While generally the decision regarding who goes to which division is decided through an arbitrary process, a god may, from time to time, make a specific request of the valkyries.” 

Everything she had said so far was, technically true. Usually, Brynhildr and Eir kept a loose tally so the forces stationed at Valhalla and Folkvagr stayed roughly equal, but they did get the occasional request, if Odin was impressed by a particularly crafty mortal or Thor admired another one’s fortitude and wanted them for his strike force. If Matthew Langmore, son of Donald, mistook her meaning in all the passive voice and non-specific language, it was hardly her fault if he made a poor choice. She was still very careful about how she phrased the next statement.

“Occasionally,” she said in a careful, weighted tone, making direct eye contact with Matthew, “the gods may… hasten the death of a mortal.”

Another technically true statement, though it had nothing to do with what she had been saying before. Thor never killed anyone just to get them to Valhalla a little faster; in the eyes of the gods, humans died soon enough on their own, so there was no need to hurry anything unless someone needed to be taught a lesson.

Abby thought Matthew Langmore needed to be taught a lesson.

For his part, Matthew was looking a little pale. “Are you here to kill me?” he asked. To his credit, his voice didn’t crack, and while the rifle barrel stayed pointed at the floor, it did stop wavering as he clasped it more firmly.

“I am here to offer you a proposition,” Abby repeated solemnly. “An opportunity to face me in combat. A chance to find death on the battlefield. A chance to join the ranks of Allfather and fight the evils that threaten to engulf us all.” She let her eyes run over the propaganda again, just for a second.

At this point, she’d said all she really could. What happened next was entirely up to Matthew. She waited, completely still, serene and eternal.

The man didn’t take his eyes off her, but she could see the gears in his head turning, churning out outlandish conclusions that fit into whatever nonsensical narrative he believe he was living in. Eventually, he said, “What happens if I say no?”

“I depart in peace,” Abby said.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” She paused for effect. “You will be troubled by me and my sisters no more.”

That was supposed to be the clincher — you either choose now service to your god, or you lose the chance forever. It wasn’t a tactic that would work with more rational folks, but Abby had been studying ideological extremists in Ruthless Rhetoric for several weeks (not to mention her private studies previously), and in rough terms, men like Matthew were attracted to alt-right discourse more generally and neo-Odinism more specifically because it made them feel like a MAN. The possibility of having his MAN-ness recognized by Thor, their god of MAN-ness, was too good to pass up for most of them. 

Matthew was no exception. He stood a little taller as he said, “I will face you in combat.”

Abby let a small smile show. “A sign of your courage,” she said, then got down to business. “We will face each other unarmed. It will be a fight to the death.”

“Is it even possible for me to kill you?” he asked.

“It is possible,” Abby admitted. She was immortal, not death-proof. Still, the human would have to dish out a lot of punishment to put her down for good.

“What would happen then?” Matthew asked, propping his rifle in the corner, next to the tiki torches.

“One of my sisters would come to resolve the situation.”

He nodded, like that made perfect sense. “Where are we going to do this?”

“The battlefield will be of your choosing.” Abby would have chosen the backyard, but it was only polite to let the man choose his own final resting place.

He looked around, considering. “This room,” he said finally, seeming to draw strength from the manifestations of his fucked-up beliefs. He picked up the coffee table — a large solid wood thing that was definitely heavy enough to have given Abby trouble — and placed it to the side, creating an open space of decent size for grappling. Abby, in the mean time, removed her sword and seax to divest herself of all weapons, setting them and her helmet in the same corner as the rifle. As she watched, Matthew folded his hands at the far side of the room and said another prayer to Thor, asking for victory and strength. It echoed through Abby’s head like the sound of a bell being rung with you inside it, causing her eyes to water and her teeth to chatter. She was still a little rattled as they squared off against each other, but, she told herself, it wouldn’t be a problem for long.

To Matthew’s credit, he was no slouch. It looked like he’d primarily trained in krav maga and didn’t bother with anything flashy or energy-wasting as they set to beating the shit out of each other. After her fight with Damien, though, Matthew’s punches felt like baby slaps. _Wow_ , she thought, _mortals really are weak_.

For a second, she started to feel bad about the whole thing, about how easy it was going to be to end this man’s life. Then she caught a glimpse of one of the smaller pieces of hate speech that plastered the walls, a digitally created photo of President Obama being lynched, and she remembered why she had picked this particular human to subject to a painful death.

She didn’t remember much of the fight after that. In the end, he bloodied her nose and maybe bruised her ribs, and she smashed his face into a bloody pulp until he stopped breathing.

For a few long seconds, she was straddling a corpse, filled with too much anger to do anything but let a raw, ragged sound tear from her throat as she punched him a few more times for good measure. Then she was left in a room completely silent except for her gasping breaths. Her hands were covered in blood. So was her tunic. When she tried to wipe her knuckles in Matthew’s shirt, she hissed in pain and gave up. She needed to get out of here before one of her sister’s showed up to escort Matthew to his afterlife.

“Piece of shit racists don’t go to Valhalla,” she said aloud, maybe to herself or maybe to Matthew’s shade. “They don’t go to Folkvagr. They go to Hel to pay for the suffering they inflicted on others.”

She grabbed her helmet and her sword belt and left out the same door she had come in. She took off with laborious flaps of her wings, relieved to feel cool air on overheated skin. For a while, adrenaline kept her going, but as soon as she saw the lights of Monstropolis, she set back on the ground, back muscles aching. She walked on slow, dazed feet through the city. There were still plenty of monsters about at this hour, but none of them paid any mind to her, blood-soaked appearance and all. She was vaguely grateful. Words seemed hard in the fog of her mind. She turned a corner and saw the apothecary a block away, softly glowing with ghoul light.

And then a voice brought her up short. “Abjelle Halcyon Freyjadottir,” Mist demanded, “what have you done?”

Abby turned slowly to see her half-sister, Mist Mosi-oa-Tunya Freyjadottir, was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, hands planted on her hips. Her dark skin was accentuated against wings that were so pale gray they were practically white. Normally her bright white teeth would flash from between her lips, but Mist was not smiling now. “Hello, Mist,” Abby said flatly.

“That’s all you have to say?” Mist said, stomping toward her. “Nothing on the fact that I just picked up the soul of a grade-A asshole who put up a hell of a fight because apparently I can’t be a real valkyrie because I’m Black — only he didn’t ‘Black’ — and that other real, ‘White’ valkyrie told him he’d been hand-picked by Thor?”

Abby winced. “I didn’t know you’d get the job,” she said. “I’m sorry he was such a dick.”

Mist huffed. “Souls being dicks is part of the job. Sometimes they’re dicks for specific reasons. Sometimes they’re dicks just because they’re mad they’re dead. Whatever.” She cut the air with her hand to indicate that part was over. “What I want to know is my baby sister is going around tricking mortals into combat with made-up stories about gods wanting them dead.”

“It’s complicated.” Abby cringed at the whine she heard in her voice. Her wings tucked tightly against her back in shame.

“Clearly,” Mist said, “otherwise, I wouldn’t be wasting so many words trying to even figure out how to ask questions about it.” She took a quick sharp breath, in and out through her nose. Mist was always so quick and sharp and sudden, like the waters of her father’s waterfall. “Did you kill that man yourself?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you tell him that he was going to Valhalla?”

“Not in so many words.”

Mist raised an eyebrow. “Did you lead him to believe he was going to Valhalla?”

“I said that valkyries take people to Valhalla sometimes,” Abby recounted. “I said that gods make requests among mortals sometimes. I said gods want mortals dead sometimes. I said I wanted to fight him in combat and he’d have a chance at Valhalla because he’d die on the battlefield.” She shrugged. “It’s not my fault if he jumped to conclusions.”

Mist was looking at her like she’d grown a second head. “And why, exactly, did you tell him that?”

Abby hung her head. “I needed to damn my soul,” she mumbled.

“You what?!”

“It for a school project!”

“Your school is making your damn your soul?” Mist looked horrified.

“They aren’t making me,” Abby said. “I just need to talk to some demons about their birth surrogate.”

That was far-fetched enough to pull Mist up short, but she seemed to decide in a split-second that it wasn’t a line of questioning worth her time. “This is some seriously underhanded shit!” she said. “Odin’s balls, this is some Loki-level devilry! What the fuck happened to you?”

“I don’t know,” Abby snapped back, wings flaring out, “maybe I got abandoned by the only family I’ve ever known! Maybe I’ve been forced to figure all this out on my own! Maybe I’m becoming a different person because I have to in order to survive this bullshit!”

Mist recoiled like she’d been struck. “You haven’t been abandoned,” she said, “not by all of us. You’ve still got me and Kara—”

“How many times have you called, Mist?” Abby asked.

“I just wanted to give you time to get settled—”

“No texts. No visits. No letters. No nothing.” Abby was crying now and, _fuck_ , it pissed her off. “Nine weeks of living like a fucking outcast.”

Mist was silent for a few seconds. “Kara and I,” she started softly, “we wanted to give you time to get used to the idea of… of not being one of us anymore.”

“Well, kudos,” Abby said. “You made it clear I’m not one of you anymore. So stay out of my fucking business.” She stalked down the street, mentally preparing to ignore Mist if she kept running her mouth, but her sister didn’t say another word, and Abby clamped her jaw shut tightly as more tears spilled down her face.

The next day, looking haggard after a night of crying and nursing sore knuckles, Abby marched to Damien’s table at lunch time. “I damned my soul,” she said to him, staring him straight in the eye.

He seemed surprised to have her suddenly in his space, but a split second after, he was narrowing his eyes to study her face. A sharp, evil grin broke across his face. “Holy shit, you did,” he said. “Welcome to the club!”

“Thanks. So dinner tonight?”

“Right.” The demon was still grinning maniacally. “You can take a portal from Monstropolis to the Eighth Circle. I’ll pick you up at the station. Try to get there around 7.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and Friday’s are usually roasted boar night. That alright with you?”

Boar was not served at Sessumnir, lest it offended Freyja’s faithful companion Hildi. Abby thought of the snow white pig, lazing about in her mother’s palace while she was tossed out like trash, and smiled tightly. “Boar sounds great.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dinner is served...

Damien leaned against his bike outside the portal station, restlessly picking at his claws with a switchblade. A nearby bell tower deafeningly tolled the hour, vibrating the station windows until the glass broke out in spider web cracks. Damien gritted his teeth but otherwise ignored the sound, unlike the parking lot’s other occupant, a wizened imp who clamped his hands over his ears and ran in a circle shrieking as he was temporarily driven mad. So maybe Hell’s bells were adding to the nervous twisting in his stomach, but he wasn’t about to let it show. After all, his insides had been writhing since lunchtime with no one the wiser.

Part of him still couldn’t believe Abby had damned her soul. Sure, it was for a school project and she was a total nerd, but she could have just as easily found some other topic for her project that only required library research. Instead, she was actually visiting him in Hell.

His scowl deepened. He was not going to get all weird about this. She was hot. He was a hot-blooded demon. The hard-on he had for her was just hormones. Totally normal. Nothing to get excited about.

When she came out of the station’s large iron doors (with the traditional “Abandon Hope” inscription), Damien was relieved to see Abby had gotten her shit together. She been a mess at school: dark circles under bloodshot eyes, baggy sweatshirt barely hanging onto her wings, hair sticking up in a weird bump that looked like she slept with her face smashed into a corner. Now her pixie cut was teased into pieces across her forehead and she’d put some concealer around her eyes to minimize the depressed raccoon affect. She had on a leather jacket over skinny jeans, but she hadn’t even reached his bike before she was reaching behind her to unzip the back slits so she could slide the jacket over her wings and off her arms. “Hey,” she said, smiling. “It’s fucking hot.”

Damien snorted, looking away before he could actually start blushing. “Yeah, well, it is Hell.”

“Fair enough.” She looked down at her dark gray t-shirt. “I didn’t really dress up.”

“Whatever,” he said, throwing a leg over his bike. “It’s just dinner.”

She slid on behind him, looping one arm loosely around his waist.

Damien focused very hard on the road in front of him.

The LaVey Estate was about twenty minutes from the station, outside the central hub of the Eighth Circle where the local lords could “get a little fucking peace and quiet,” as Lucien liked to say. They had a townhouse in the hub, where one of his dads would sometimes reside if they were getting sick of each other. The first time Stan had moved there when Damien was a kid, he’d cried like a fucking baby, thinking his dads were getting divorced, but they’d sat him down and explained that part of keeping a relationship working was being clear when you needed some time to yourself. Damien hadn’t truly believed them until, a month later, Stan had returned to the estate and proceeded to gross Damien out with all kinds of public displays of affection for his husband. Now that he was older, they made no secret that occasionally one of them would indulge in a side piece — “just to scratch an itch,” Lucien put it — and the separate space of the townhouse let them keep passing fancies separate from the important long-term shit.

The bike flew through the estate’s gates like a bat out of hell, speeding up a drive lined with apple trees that were covered with fruit both beautifully smooth and maggot-ridden. Damien maneuvered the bike into the garage, between a hearse and the ‘68 Ford Mustang GT from _Bullitt_ , one of Stan's favorite movies. “So, here we are,” he said lamely after he cut the engine.

“Cool,” Abby said, but the look on her face was anything but. She was peering around at everything like her head was on a swivel as she climbed off the bike, looking at the trees and the carrion crows that flew overheard and the lush lawn that withered and dried when you approached it. She walked out the garage door to study the exterior of the manor. “Is it just you and your dads here?” she asked.

Damien shoved his hands in his pockets. “Lucien’s mom lives with us too, and there’s the staff. We’ve got a butler, housekeeper, chef, groundskeeper…” He trailed off trying to remember. “I think maybe a dungeon master? Fuck if I know. Anyway, they live here too, in the staff wing.”

“It must be nice to have all that space to yourself,” Abby said. “I mean, my mom’s house is as big as this, but there were, like, forty of us living there.”

“Fuck, that sounds terrible.”

Abby screwed up her face, like she really had to think about it. “Yeah,” she said finally, “I think it kinda was.”

“Damien!” Stan called from the door that led from the garage to the main entry way. “Are you actually coming in or are we picnicking on the lawn tonight?” His dad was smiling when Damien turned to scowl at him.

“It’s my fault, my lord,” Abby said quickly, hurrying back inside the garage. “I was admiring the grounds. My apologies.” She ducked her head graciously. “I am Abjelle Halcyon F-freyjadottir, and I thank you for your hospitality.”

Damien started to snicker at Abby being so wound up she stumbled over own name, but he cut it off when Stan lifted an eyebrow in his direction. His dad said, “You are most welcome, daughter of Freyja.” Damien looked down when Abby made a small noise; her smile was still plastered on, but it looked more like she was clenching her teeth now. Whatever was wrong, Stan seemed to pick up on it too, because he said quickly, “But please, let’s not stand on ceremony. Come on in, and call me Stan.”

“Thank you, Stan,” Abby said, as though this were still part of some ritual, and passed the threshold at Stan’s invitation. “I go by Abby.”

Stan was still smirking as Damien pushed past him as well. “It’s not often Damien brings home someone so polite,” Stan said, coming in behind his son. “Can I take your coat?” 

Abby relinquished her jacket. “I’d get ten lashes every time I forgot how to greet guests,” she admitted. “The whip is unforgettable teacher.” 

Stan laughed. Damien scowled. “Lucien is in the study,” Stan said. “Damien, why don’t you take our guest there while I check in with Xaphan?”

“Fine.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “This way.”

Abby was still looking around like a total noob as they crossed the grand hall and went down a short hallway to the sliding doors of the study. “Am I doing okay?” she asked nervously.

Damien snorted. “Keep this up and you’ll have my dads eating out of your hands before the night is over.”

When he looked at her, she was grinning a little. “Could be useful,” she said, “having some demon lords in your corner.”

He huffed. “Why bother when you’ve got a goddess for a mom?”

Abby pulled up short. “Damien,” she said, then trailed off.

He turned to face her, and Baphomet’s bollocks if she didn’t look like the very definition of crest-fallen. “What’s the problem?” he asked, cringing a little at how harsh he sounded.

She took a breath, then said, “I don’t really want to go into all the details right now, but… my mom isn’t really… part of my life anymore.” Her hands clenched and released like she was trying not to explode or punch the walls. “And I know it’s probably weird that I’ll talk about what my life was like before I moved here and all that shit, but I’d kind of appreciate it if you didn’t bring her up.”

“Shit,” Damien said, suddenly realizing that Abby actually never had said much about her mom beyond some basic information that anybody could pull off the internet. “Okay. No problem.”

Her posture relaxed and she met his eyes again. “Thanks.”

Damien shrugged. “Course,” he said, then hesitated. “Are you, like, okay? If you wanna bail on dinner or whatever, it’s cool.”

Abby shook her head. “No, nothing like that,” she said firmly. “I just… we’re, like, friends now, right? I just wanted to tell you.” She shrugged. “That’s all.”

“Yeah, alright.” Damien rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I guess I’ll introduce you to my pops?”

“Okay.” Abby smiled again, and this time, it looked like she felt more at ease, like she’d actually unburdened herself. Damien turned away before he said anything stupid and stomped the rest of the way down the corridor. Throwing open the sliding doors, he said, “Hey, Pops. This is Abby.”

Lucien stood from one of the wing-backed chairs artfully arranged around the study’s fireplace. “Abby,” he said smoothly, extending his hand. “Welcome to our home.”

Abby shook his hand, head down once more. “I thank you for your hospitality, my lord.”

“Lucien,” Lucien said. Damien wondered why anyone even had names anyway. “Can I offer you an aperitif?” He gestured to a tray with oversized shot glasses of arak, watered down and milky.

Abby glanced at Damien uncertainly, like it was some kind of test. He grinned at her. “This is Hell,” he said, grinning at her. “There’s no such thing as ‘legal drinking age.’” He picked up two of the small glasses and handed her one. “You’ll like it,” he assured her, then warned, “but sip it first.”

Lucien picked up his own tiny glass and raised it in a small salute. Damien was used to seeing food and drink disappear without him holding it to his face, but to her credit, Abby didn’t stare too much. Probably because she spent so much time with that shadow kid, Oz.

She did cough like a noob after her first sip of the arak. “Wow,” she said, “what is this?”

“Absinthe’s older brother,” Lucien said. “Please sit down. I understand that you moved to Monstropolis recently. How do you like it so far?”

While Abby sat and made polite small talk with his pops, Damien rambled around the study restlessly. The arak did help calm his nerves a little; despite its potency, this little glass wasn’t enough alcohol to do much for him, but arak before dinner was routine in the LaVey household. After a few minutes, Stan joined them, perching on the arm of Lucien’s chair and taking the final aperitif from the tray.

“Finals are coming up, aren’t they?” Stan asked, casting his voice so it was clear the question was intended for his son. When Damien didn’t say anything, Stan pushed further. “Hm? Damien?”

“Fuck, yes, okay?” Damien spat, knocking a book on the floor just because it was nearby. “Finals are coming up.”

“What are you even taking this semester?” Lucien asked.

Damien sighed. “Civics,” he admitted, dragging his feet a little as he made his way to the empty chair next to Abby. “AP Murder. Art II. Curses III. Arcane Chem.”

“And are you going to pass those classes?” Lucien asked. The blank red plane of his face moved in a way that indicated his skepticism.

Before Damien could say anything, Abby came to his defense. “He’s definitely gonna pass AP Murder,” she said glumly. “I’ve had to talk him into helping me with my homework. Ms. Demonslayer is making me do an independent study next semester to try to make up for what I missed anyway.”

“It’s not uncommon to repeat courses at Spooky High,” Stan said sympathetically. “Damien had to take Ruthless Rhetoric… how many times?”

“Four,” Damien admitted sullenly. “Mr. Stopheles is a total hard ass.”

Abby grimaced. “I might have to retake that one too,” she said. “Apparently he wasn’t totally blown away by my last paper.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Maybe he’ll let me revise it…”

In the corner, a small bell chimed, signally that dinner was ready to be served. Damien and both his dads threw back what was left of their arak, and after a second, Abby did the same, trying to hide a cough behind her hand. Damien grinned at her. She gave a small smile back. “I liked that drink,” she said. “It reminds me a little of akvavit.”

Stephens was waiting in the dining room with a bottle of wine for his lords’ inspection. “Chef Xaphan has recommended this Chateau Byleth cabernet sauvignon for tonight’s meal,” the butler intoned as they took their seats. Stephens was as fastidious as one would expect a cat-headed demon to be and poured a pristine tasting into Lucien’s waiting glass before pivoting precisely to pour for Stan. It was all a production; neither Stephens nor Xaphan would present anything with the least chance of being rejected, and Lucien waved his permission with a hand after he had sampled. Damien fiddled with his napkin, suddenly very aware of Abby sitting next to him. No one had sat next to him at dinner since…

Since...

 _Julian_ , he thought forcefully. _You can at least think his name, you fucking coward._

“So,” Lucien said, clasping his fingers into an arch in front of him, “Stan mentioned you’re working on a report about the Sodomites?”

Abby blushed very slightly. “Um, well, the project is to report on some aspect of family structures in our assigned cultural group,” she explained, smoothing her hands over her own napkin as she laid it in her lap. “I happened to be assigned Hell, and, well, Damien’s the only demon I really know, so…”

“So she wanted to know how two dudes made a baby,” Damien finished.

Abby blushed even harder. “I mean, kinda? I mean, not that I wanted to pry into your lives, personally, but generally speaking, like, what options there are for demons who, for whatever reason, can’t or don’t want to carry a child…” She trailed off again, staring hard at the table, almost as red as Damien. After a second of silence, she planted her elbow on the table and her forehead in her palm. “There is no way for this to not sound creepy, is there,” she muttered.

Stan, whose grin had been growing the whole time she’d been talking, finally let out his laugh. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s good to ask questions and be curious.” 

“Basically a core tenet of Hell,” Lucien added, swirling wine in his glass and looking like he was preparing to offer a poor mortal a deal.

“So, why don’t we tell you what the process was like when we had Damien,” Stan suggested, “and you can asked questions whenever you want.”

“Okay,” Abby said, sounding relieved. She even pulled a small notebook and pen from her jeans pocket, laying them near at hand.

And so the first course passed with Stan and Lucien reliving their choice to become parents, the applications and fees, the blood ritual used to imbue a fetus with their respective essences and its implantation in the surrogate, the anxious thirteen months spent waiting, and finally the arrival of little Damien, kicking and screaming and shooting fireballs. Stan even teared up. Damien felt queasy, but that might have had something to do with how fast he was drinking his wine with only a bare layer of soup and salad in his stomach.

Abby had scribbled notes ferociously with her right hand while her left worked her utensils, but she didn’t actually eat that much. Damien only now noticed that her knuckles on both hands were split and bruised, though she obviously taken care with doctoring them. Had to have been some brawl. Maybe he’d ask her about it later. If he could even meet her eye anymore, that was.

Chef Xaphan brought the platter of boar out himself, setting it on the table with a careful flourish. The specimen was on the small side, but when they weren’t hosting a large party, Lucien and Stan refused to waste money on pig no one would eat. Abby’s eyes were big when the meal was presented, and perhaps it was just that she had spent so much of the evening flushed with heat or blushing in embarrassment, but Damien was pretty sure she went a little pale. However, when Xaphan placed a slice on her plate, with mashed potatoes soaking up the red juices, she wasted no time levering a piece into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully, then enthusiastically. “This is really good,” she announced, looking around at everyone like this was some kind of revelation.

“The lady flatters me,” the dour chef said as he continued serving Damien and his dads.

“Xaphan has been cooking Friday night boar for us for nearly a century now,” Lucien said, “and I’d say he has it down to an art.”

“As I have told my lord before,” Xaphan said, “it is no art, merely the careful monitoring of the fire.”

Once they’d all had a chance to indulge in the boar — Damien was already diving in for seconds — Stan said, “So, Abby, questions?”

Abby wiped her mouth with her napkin as she nodded. “So, the surrogates,” she said. “How are they chosen? Can any of the Sodomites be a surrogate?”

“Technically, yes,” Lucien said. “But there is something of a pecking order, and there’s never so much demand that those farther down are called upon.”

“In fact,” Stand went on, “there’s something of an unofficial policy that sexual offenders who actively forwarded anti-abortion measurements during their lives are called on first and most frequently.”

Abby’s face broke out into a wide smile. “Well that only seems fair,” she said brightly.

“Indeed,” Lucien agreed.

“Do you have any idea how many surrogates are, uh, incubating in a given year?” she asked.

Stan and Lucien exchanged a glance. “No idea,” Stan admitted, “but we could put you in contact with someone who would know.” He looked to Lucien again. “Abyzou is still running the agency, isn’t she?”

“So far as I know,” Lucien said, another bit disappearing into his face. Damien had always resented all the times his Pops told him not to talk with food in his mouth when Lucien got to do it all the time.

“Anyway,” Stan said, “we’ll give you her email. Honestly, she could probably tell you more about how the whole system works than we can. Just tell her we sent you and I’m sure she’ll be quite helpful.”

“Thanks!” Abby said, clearly enthusiastic about having this new line of research to follow. Damien rolled his eyes at what a nerd she was. His stomach also may have lurched from how cute she got when she was excited.

Damien and his dads would usually make a major dent in a boar, with some leftovers for sandwiches the next day, but with Abby — who seemed to have found her appetite once her report was out of the way — the animal was picked clean. As Xaphan cleared the remains, Stephens reemerged with desert: a dark chocolate chili torte. It was one of Damien’s personal favorites, but when Abby took a small bite, her face went the reddest it had been all night. “HOLY FUCK ODIN’S BALLS,” she yelled, then, looking at Damien’s dads through watery eyes, followed with, “I’m so sorry but that’s so spicy and I think I’m going to die…” The last bit was hard to understand because she was just panting with her mouth wide open. Suddenly she was standing and pacing, wings flapping erratically as her hands waved in front of her face.

Ever dutiful Stephens appeared with a glass of milk, and Abby drank every drop as Damien laughed so hard he had tears trailing down his own face. “You look like someone mashed together the red and white play-doh and made a doofy face out of it,” he said, pointing at her blotchy features.

Abby scowled at him as she swallowed a final mouthful of milk. “You wanna go, fuckface?” she snapped at him, then, once again, remembered his dads. “Shit, sorry!” she babbled. “I’m so sorry. I’m not used to spicy food or having people make fun of me for not being used to spicy foods.”

But Lucien and Stan were laughing again. “Don’t worry about it,” Lucien said. “And feel free to beat the shit out of our son.”

“I’d like to see her try,” Damien smirked, pointedly taking another bit of his torte as he stared Abby down.

“Last time came out a draw,” Abby said as she sat down again. “Next time you might not get so lucky.”

“That’s right!” Stan said. “She’s the one who kicked your ass on prom night!”

“She didn’t kick my ass!” Damien retorted.

Lucien gave him a look. “You didn’t look so great,” he said.

“Yeah, well, she didn’t either,” he muttered. “In fact, she might had died without medical aid, and I would have just been walking around with broken ribs for a few weeks, so I think that makes me the winner.”

“I would hardly call your haphazard cauterization ‘medical aid,’” Abby said. “And I wouldn’t have died; I just would have probably passed out for a while. And felt really shitty when I woke up.”

Damien rolled his eyes. “Keep telling yourself that, angel cake.”

“You want a rematch?” Abby said, and her eyes were looking a little wild. “I’ll give you a rematch, and this time you won’t have your friend to bail you out when you start flagging.”

Damien leaned back smugly. “I’d kick your ass right now, but my dads have a rule about fighting at the dinner table.”

“It’s true,” Stan said, nodding like he wasn’t the one that had instituted the rule and instead was only under its provision as well. “That’s what we have the Blood Dome for.”

“Of course,” Lucien said — and Damien could see they had already talked this over beforehand because of course they did — “if you’d be interested in taking this disagreement to the Blood Dome, I’m sure it would be quite a hit with the fans.”

Abby looked blankly around the room. Damien didn’t meet her eyes, just stared up at the ceiling and wished that his dads hadn’t warded the house against Raguloth the Unblinking Maw because he wouldn’t mind having the manifestation of insatiable hunger swallow him up right about now. “What’s the Blood Dome?” she finally asked.

“It’s like the Eight Circle’s Coliseum,” Damien answered, trying to make it sound as boring as possible. “Every other week, it hosts big fight nights.”

“And just anyone can show up and jump in the ring?”

“Not exactly,” Lucien said. “Generally speaking, prospective competitors first make a name for themselves in some of the smaller arenas before being invited to compete in a Blood Dome match, but Damien here happens to currently be a win streak that could take him into the annual championship as the favorite.”

“PoOoOops,” Damien whined. “You always bring that up…”

“What?” Lucien said, gesturing widely with his wine glass. “I’m not allowed to be proud of my son?”

“Whatever,” said son muttered darkly.

“In any case,” Stan said, deliberately ignoring Damien’s discomfort, “as Lords of the Eighth Circle, Lucien and I can get any match on the billing that we want, so if you ever want that rematch…” He trailed off with a suggestive shrug, then sat up straighter like he’d just had a great idea. “Or you could team up to take on the doubles division! Damien hasn’t found a good partner yet—”

“Because I haven’t been fucking looking!” Damien snapped. “For fuck’s sake!”

“Alright, alright,” Stan said. “It was just an idea.”

Damien finished his torte and ate Abby’s and didn’t say another word for the rest of the meal while Abby and his dads talked some more about Azybou who may or may not still head up the surrogate agency. “Well,” Stan said, after conversation had wound down, “if there’s nothing else we can do for you, I believe Lucien and I will retire for the evening.”

Abby gathered up her notebook and pen. “Yeah, I should really be getting home. Thanks again for dinner and the information and everything.”

“Always glad to help with school,” Stan said, smiling. “If only Damien would ask himself.”

Damien huffed. “Come on,” he said to Abby, “I’ll give you a ride back to the portal station.”

They didn’t talk. That was one of the benefits of the motorcycle; you didn’t have to make strained conversation with your passenger if things went tits up and not in the good way. Damien steeled himself for an awkward goodbye at the station, then a long ride back home where he could lock himself in his room and scream himself hoarse because his dads were fucking idiots and he was also a fucking idiot and everything was stupid.

In the station parking lot, Abby climbed off the bike, planting her hand on his shoulder for balance. “So…” she said, brushing wind-tangled hair down with her fingers, “I know that was weird and awkward, with your dads talking about how they made you and everything. And I know you probably knew before you even invited me over that it would be weird, so… thanks.” She smiled, looking a little shy. “It was really cool of you to put up with all that shit just so I could write my report.”

Damien tried to be cool, but he definitely felt his face burning when he said, “Whatever. My dads are fucking weirdos, like, 98% of the time, so it was no big deal.” Then he remembered her knuckles. “Hey, how’d you fuck up your hands?” he asked.

Abby looked down at the body parts in question, frowning. “Oh. Uh. Damning my soul.”

“Oh yeah! You never told me how you did it!”

“Um, well.” Abby kept looking at her hands. “I kind of beat a white supremacist to death after maybe giving him the impression that if he faced me in combat he’d get taken into the ranks of Odin’s army of dead souls when actually all adherents to extremist ideologies get a hard pass.”

“Seriously?” Damien said. “That’s rad as fuck!”

Abby grinned. “Yeah, it kinda was.” She chewed her lip. “So, could I maybe come watch you at the Blood Dome sometime?” she asked hesitantly. “I mean, it’s cool if you don’t want me to—”

“It’s fine,” Damien said with a shrug. “Actually Vera and Scott have come to a few of my matches.” He looked away, one hand clenching around the bike’s handle bars. “I just hate it when my dads talk it up like it’s the one thing I’ve got going for me,” he admitted. “Like, I like doing it — it’s fucking fun as hell — and I know they get a kick out of watching me disembowel my opponents and remind everyone in the Eighth Circle why you don’t fuck with the LaVeys, but I don’t want fighting in the Blood Dome to be the only thing I do.”

Abby nodded. “I get that. My dad keeps telling me I have to relax and unwind, but he doesn’t seem to understand any hobbies that don’t involve hanging out with strangers and then sometimes fucking them.”

Damien made a face. “Why would you tell your dad about that even if that’s what you were doing?”

“I know, right?” Abby said, rolling her eyes. “But, yeah, I get how frustrating it is to have a parent latch onto one thing and not let it go.”

They stood in a moment of mutual misery.

“Anyway,” Damien said, “next Blood Dome night is next Saturday. If you wanna come, you can sit in my dads’ box, if you don’t mind hanging out with them. They literally have the best seats because, ya know, lords of Hell.”

“I’d like that,” Abby said.

As he drove home, Damien kept picturing how bright her face had looked, almost glowing with the promise of violence and pain in the oily darkness that was night in Hell.

He was so, so fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, updates might so down a bit at this point because I'm working on another project for Camp NaNoWriMo this July. Then again, I also might amaze even myself and just blast words out all over the place. Guess we'll see.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so, I spent July working on my original stuff, but now I seriously need to indulge in some escapism as I make the death march toward my campus reopening in a week and a half 🙃
> 
> I can't promise "regular" updates right now, but I am back to work on this story!
> 
> Please enjoy friends advocating for each other to create healthy relationships coupled with some gratuitous violence.

Abyzou of the Sodomite surrogate agency sent Abby more information that she could possibly fit into a ten page paper, and she was feeling pretty pleased with the finished product when she handed it in to Mr. Taur on Monday. Getting to cite personal interviews with not one, but two lords of Hell was a research high she’d probably never get to experience again, and Abby let herself savor the feeling. It wasn’t often she was given time to indulge her scholarly interests between weapons training, lute practice, stable duties, and elocution lessons — all things that were intended to make her into a valkyrie worthy of the name. So maybe she missed the regular sparing, but it was nice to get to do what _she_ wanted to do with her time… including nerding out on schoolwork.

  
(Abby was making a point of acknowledging every single little thing that was better about her life now that she was in Monstropolis with a viciousness and hostility that made it a practice in spite more than gratitude.)

The triumph was short-lived though; Mr. Stopheles informed her that while her current grade in Ruthless Rhetoric made passing possible, it wasn’t probable. Abby was beginning to see his reputation as a hard ass was earned — and perhaps even an understatement. Then again, he was a demon, so getting his jollies by torturing high schoolers with pop quizzes on rhetorical figures seemed pretty in-character. When she asked about the possibility of revising her recent essay, Mr. Stopheles simply ignored the request like she hadn’t actually said anything.

At the same time, she was no longer the only person who seemed to be stressing about finals. Vicky started organizing group study sessions that actually seemed more productive than social, probably because the Frankenstein girl was both extremely persistent and incredibly nice and there came a point where not focusing made you an asshole. She had even gotten Scott into a study routine that involved some combination of flashcards, a desk-top basketball game, and beef jerky, and Abby was genuinely impressed by both Scott’s motivation to please his girlfriend and Vicky’s ability to teach him post-pre-algebra in the eleventh hour.

Abby was with the two of them and Amira at Killer Beans, a whole table covered in books and notes as they reviewed for Curses, when Oz rushed in like a cold chill and slammed into a chair, immediately planting their face in their arms. Waves of anxiety and depression radiated from them like Abby had never felt, but apparently this was relatively normal. “Hey,” Amira said, touching their shoulder gently, “what’s wrong?”

“Liam and I had a fight,” they said, and even though their voice was muffled, Abby could hear the underlying shrieks of eternal despair in their voice.

“Aw shit.” Amira rubbed a little circle. “What about?”

“I told him I couldn’t hang out tonight because I had to study with you guys and he got all superior and said that worrying about grades is so mainstream…” The story poured out of Oz in one big stream. “And I told him that I wasn’t about to flunk Curses just because he thought it was mainstream because if I fail even one class my parents will make me go back home and I’ll never see my friends again. And then he did that little half-laugh, half-huff in disgust and said that bowing to parental standards of success was just a way for the youth of today to avoid acknowledging the meaninglessness of their existence. So I said that not all of us had the privilege of outliving our parents and everyone else we ever knew and he could either have a joyfriend that passed Curses or he could have no joyfriend at all and I stormed out.” They paused for a second. “I kinda yelled that last part.”

There was silence around the table as everyone processed the story in their own way. Finally, Vicky said, “I’m proud of you for standing up for yourself and your needs.”

“Yeah,” Amira agreed, nodding so hard her hair sputtered. “Way to not let him push you around.”

“But now he’s going to break up with me!” Oz wailed, and Abby’s back teeth felt like they were whining under the strain. Several of the coffee shop’s other customers shot them dirty looks.

“Okay, Oz,” Vicky said, getting up to squat by their chair, “just take a deep breath. In and out.” She demonstrated. “Nice and slow, just breathe with me for a few seconds.”  
The whining in Abby’s head receded, to her immense relief.

“That’s good, bud,” Amira said, her hand still rubbing a steady circle on Oz’s back.

“Right, so,” Vicky picked up, “first of all, you don’t know that he’s going to break up with you—”

“But I threw it in his face that his whole family is dead,” Oz said.

“Don’t worry about it!” Scott said brightly, his whole body leaned toward the shadow kid in his desire to make things better. “I forget that Liam’s family is dead all the time. Just last week, I asked him what he got his mom for Mother’s Day. He never holds it against me.”

“Yeah, but you’re just his friend,” Oz complained, finally peeling their face off the tabletop. “I’m his joyfriend.”

Scott cocked his head to the side in confusion. “Why does that make a difference?”

Oz looked at the werewolf like he had grown another head.

“He’s got a point,” Abby cut in. “If he has greater expectations on you than he has on the rest of his friends when it comes to stuff like that, it’s not really fair.”

“Yeah,” said Vicky, “and honestly, if — and I’m really emphasizing the if here — he does break up with over something this stupid, then that means it wasn’t a good relationship to begin with.”

“I think it’s a good relationship,” Oz said quietly. “It was just one bad moment. I was just an idiot.”

“What exactly do you think you were an idiot about?” Amira asked. “Because you trying to tell him that you needed time to focus on something important to you — no matter what that is or why it’s important — deserves better than smug hipster condescension.”

Oz nodded. “I mean, I wish I hadn’t gotten quite so… hysterical? I’m just really stressed and I kind of blew up. And I wish I hadn’t said that thing about everyone he knew being dead. That was just shitty.”

Abby nodded. “Yeah, it kinda was. But it also maybe highlighted a big difference in what you’ve got going on in your lives. It’s easy to laugh off being worried about what your parents will do or say when you don’t have parents.”

“I think sometimes he kind of forgets I still have a family,” Oz said, rubbing their fingers along the wood grain. “It’s not like I can take him home and introduce him.” Their eyebrows scrunched up. “Not that I want to.” They sighed. “I need some tea.”

Vicky popped up off the floor like an excited terrier. “One soothing herbal blend coming right up!”

“Thanks,” Oz said as she bounced away. They pulled out their phone, staring at the screen for a moment. “I think I want to send a text that says sorry for bringing his family into it and leave it at that. I mean, that’s the only thing I do feel sorry about.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Abby said and Amira nodded her agreement.

Scott also nodded. “Sometimes I think Liam doesn’t always know the strength of his disinterested facade like I don’t always know the strength of my muscles,” he said thoughtfully. “And then next thing you know, someone is yelling because I accidentally hurt them and I apologize and try very hard to be more gentle next time.” He smiled. “I think Liam should do that.”

“Ya know, big guy,” Amira said, sliding back into her own space as Oz sent their message, “I think you’re smarter than people give you credit for.”

Scott beamed like a small, hairy sun. “It’s because Vicky’s working so hard at tutoring me!” he exclaimed. “She’s really the smart one.”

By the time they went their separate ways, Liam had texted Oz an apology of his own, and Oz happily reported that they were going to call their boyfriend on their way to the shop where Brian worked. Abby vaguely wondered if dumping all of her feelings into a pile at her friends’ feet could be just as easy.

Abby went home to frozen waffles with ligonberry jam and couple of therapeutic hours killing people in interesting ways in _Ingot Cog Liquid V: Ghost Gore_. She'd beaten the game all the way through three times, but when she was stressed, she always returned to Serpent and his obsession hiding in cardboard boxes while infiltrating enemy camps. In her dreams, she flunked all her classes and Hal made her work as a maid at his resort for the rest of her life. He even made her wear a skimpy maid costume, which left her with all kinds of gross feelings when she woke up. Sexy dreams about half sisters that were centuries older than you and barely counted as family were one thing. Weird dreams about your dad’s potential fetishes were another.

On Friday, Damien sat next to her at lunch. They hadn’t really talked since she’d visited Hell; she was too focused on finals and he didn’t really seem like the study group type. “You still interested in the Blood Dome tomorrow?” he asked, smashing his baked potato with his fork until it was just mashed potatoes.

“Fuck yes,” Abby almost moaned. “I need a break from studying, and absolutely mindless violence sounds perfect.”

The demon looked up at her, his pointed teeth on display in a small grin. “Nothing better than a little blood-thirst for curing nerd.”

Abby shook her head. “I’m starting to think I like both just fine,” she admitted. “Like, a lot of the stuff we’re doing at school sucks, but I kinda like learning all this new stuff about different monsters and how they live and everything.”

Damien shrugged. “To each their own or whatever,” he said. “Anyway, the matches start at 8. I’ll have to be there earlier to get registered and weighed in and all that shit, but the station is on the way from my dads’ house, so they could pick you up, if you want.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I could get an Uber… actually, do they even have Uber in Hell?”

“Are you kidding? A business model like that could only be born in Hell,” Damien said. “But the price gouging during prime time hours is even worse than on Earth, so just let my dads give you a ride.” He grimaced. “They’ve been hounding me all week after I mentioned you might want to come.”

“Alright,” Abby said, “that sounds great.” She crunched through an apple slice. “So are these matches hand-to-hand or what?”

“Nah, you get a list of approved weapon classes to choose from,” Damien explained. “I usually go for a tabar-style battle axe with a flanged mace on the other end. Gives me some versatility.”

Abby hummed. “I prefer Dane axes myself, but I think it’s because that’s what I’m most familiar with.”

“A well-made Dane axe is hard to beat,” Damien agreed, “but I like the crescent blade. Gives you a little hook for catching flesh or armor. The drawback is the lighter weight of the tabar makes it less effective for flat-out clobbering.”

Abby smirked. “I’m guessing that’s why you added a mace?”

Damien smirked back. “You got it.”

Brian tried to sit with them at lunch, but they ended up talking about axes the whole time and eventually the zombie just kind of wandered off.

* * *

When Abby emerged from the portal station into the Eighth Circle heat, she was relieved that Damien’s dads were already there waiting for her with their limo because she didn’t know if she could stand waiting around while her skin fried off. She could handle some pretty high temperatures without getting hurt, but that didn’t make it comfortable, especially when she was more used to colder climes in general. “Thanks for giving me a ride,” she said as she climbed into the car, taking a seat on the side.

“Not at all,” Stan said. “We’re glad you wanted to come. The Blood Dome is one of the Eighth Circles most popular features, and we’re always happy to show it off.”

Stan actually seemed really into playing tour guide, pointing out some of the sights as they made their way through the Eighth Circle's urban hub. Abby stared out the window as they approached the Blood Dome — a towering coliseum covered by a smooth, rounded roof that made it look like a giant ruby cabochon set into the landscape of the city. The limo pulled into an underground parking area patrolled by several guards in thick, padded armor — after they paused briefly for the driver to present his credentials — then Lucien and Stan ushered Abby into an elevator that took them straight to their private box, which was about as nice as any private box for a spectator sport could be. The two demons guided her to a trio of wingback chairs, and a moment later, an imp in a cummerbund was hoisting a tray up for Lucien and Stan to take glasses of deep red wine. “And what would the miss like?” the wizened waiter asked her with a slight bow.

“Get whatever you want,” Stan said. “It’s all on our tab.”

“Uh…” Abby stammered, “beer?”

“The bar has many offerings on tap,” the imp said patiently. “Perhaps the miss could inform me of her tastes and I could bring a small sampling of options.”

“A witbier would be nice,” Abby said, fingers digging nervously into the upholstery of her chair. “Or a juicy IPA. But really, I’m sure anything you bring will be fine.”

The first match was a free-for-all, a dozen Blood Dome hopefuls duking it out to claim their place at the bottom on the ranks. It was brutal comedy, with most of the competitors obviously underprepared, but the blue demoness who won was good — strong, efficient, and experienced if the scars were anything to go by.

“Looks like the Aquinos are making another play,” Lucien said as Dahlia Aquino took a victory lap around the ring.

Stan hummed in agreement. “You’d think they’d have given up by now.”

“Maybe it’s just Dahlia this time,” Lucien said. He sounded very bored. “At least that way we can have Damien take care of it.”

“Maybe,” Stan answered, not sounding entirely convinced. “Maybe we should have Carrevor snoop around just in case. It would be seriously embarrassing if they finally toppled us just because we were too lazy to check up on them.”

Abby didn’t say anything, a little afraid that the lords of Hell would realize they were talking secret Hell business in front of her.

The next match featured four teams of two fighters each, and it got messy fast — not only did each competitor have to watch their own back, they had to keep an eye on their partner. More than one fighter was caught off guard because the teammate they thought was on their six had been eliminated. Abby could see why Damien would hesitate to jump into doubles matches.

In the middle of the third match, the waiter delivered a second beer, which Abby accepted without taking her eyes from the mayhem as four single competitors pummeled each other into the ground. Her pulse was definitely up, and somehow she’d managed to shift herself forward until she was on the edge of her seat, her wings crammed behind her in a taut mess. When the match finished with the harpy slamming the long-limbed demon into the arena’s dirt with the sound of a hunk of meat being thrown on the sidewalk, Abby roared with the rest of the crowd and didn’t even care that she was cheering for a dirty feather-duster.

“I take it you’re enjoying yourself,” Lucien said as the din abated.

“Uh, yes,” Abby stammered, suddenly embarrassed by her behavior. “Thank you.”

Stan smiled indulgently. “It only gets better. The death matches are about to begin.”

“Death matches?” Abby said. Thus far, the fights had ended when competitors were either unable to get up or had been forced onto the runes at the corners of the arena and teleported away. “You mean Damien could die?”

Lucien waggled a hand. “Yes, but not permanently. The Blood Dome is called such because it was built using some rather complex blood magic that makes it a soul trap. Anyone who dies in the ring has their soul transported to a dedicated region of Limbo to stew on their defeat until our necromedics have patched up their corporeal forms. It usually takes around 48 hours.”

“It creates consequences for losing,” Stan added. “Limbo isn’t pleasant and a functioning body isn’t necessarily free from pain, but we wouldn’t want to always be losing our fiercest competitors.”

Abby nodded as though she understood but she honestly didn’t — not quite. “How do you keep the valkyries away?” she asked, knowing her sisters would be called to any death on a battle field, even one as limited as the Blood Dome.

“Hela brokered us a deal with Odin,” Lucien explained, more wine disappearing from his glass as he spoke. “It wasn’t a hard sell, since most of these souls are unfit for service in Valhalla or Folkvangr, and Hela didn’t really want to have to deal with them herself. Ah, here we are!”

Lucien leaned forward, blank red face pointed unerringly toward a pair of fighters that were striding through the arena’s archway. The crowd echoed his excitement, and the large centaur and sleek naga waved at their fans. “Make their seventh death match appearance,” the announcer boomed, “they are centaur of stomp and the serpent of swing… Caucus and Maera… better known as the CRUEL CRYPTIDS!”

The noise was defeaning. Stan leaned close to Abby’s ear and said loudly, “Cacus is Eighth Circle born-and-raised.”

Abby nodded — hometown boy would get the crowd every time.

But the cheers changed in tune when a second pair emerged at the arena’s other side. “Make their third death match appearance,” the announcer said while the bulky demon and his golem companion scowled at the unfriendly audience. “Emmett and Bastion… THE ROCK AND THE HARD PLACE!”

A few fans made themselves heard, but overall, the Cruel Cryptids seemed to be the favorites.

“A thousand bucks says Maera takes out the golem,” Stan said to Lucien with a sly smile.

“You’re on,” Lucien said without hesitation. “Her poison is useless against him. She’ll take Bastion and leave Emmett to Cacus.”

Stan ended up being right, but it was a close thing: the naga spent most of the match harassing the demon with her naginata while the centaur used his morning star and hooves to put some cracks in the golem, but in a sneaky sudden switch, Maera slithered under Cacus’s legs and wrapped her body around the golem several times, squeezing the coil tight. The golem got in three or four solid hits with his boulder fists, but with a thunderous crack he split into a dozen pieces under the naga’s persistent pressure.

Stan laughed like only a lord of Hell could while Lucien muttered something about it all being a shared bank account anyway.

At that point, Maera had taken some serious damage, with huge bloody dents in her snake half where the golem had hit her. In an obviously signature move, if the audience’s excitement was anything to go by, Cacus galloped to his partner and caught her extended hand to pull her only his back, where she draped her coils over his flanks and whirled her naginata over his head. Facing the new threat, the demon dropped back into a defensive stance, and Abby had an idea of what he would try next when she saw how his grip changed on his claymore. Unfortunately for Cacus, he was watching the blade’s angle instead of Bastion’s body language, and when he closed with his opponent, the centaur brought his morning star up to deflect an upward slice that never came. Instead, Bastion dropped to his knee, swinging the flat of the blade into Cacus’s foreleg with enough force to lose his grip on the sword and snap the bone like a twig.

Cacus went down with a scream of pain, but his partner had the presence of mind to use his fall to add momentum to her thrust, driving the naginata down to pin the demon to the ground where he knelt. With a whip-quick precision that was impressive given how much Cacus was flailing as he tried to get his good legs back under him, the naga dragged a knife across Bastion’s throat, ensuring his death.

The sound in the arena was deafening as the crowd roared their approval. Abby surged to her feet with them, bellowing a wordless cry as she clung to the railing of the VIP box and watching Maera hold aloft her bloody dagger. Cacus even managed to rise on three legs, pumping a fist in the air with victory. From where Abby stood, it was clear he was in a great deal of pain, but to the spectators farther from the action, he probably looked unbothered by his injury. He limped off the field unaided, though Maera slid from his back to make her own slow way to the exit.

“They're quite a team,” Lucien commented, and when Abby looked over her shoulder, she could tell he was amused even with his blank red face. She felt her own face redden with embarrassment. “It was a good fight,” she said, sitting back down quickly and taking a gulp from her beer.

“Cacus and Damien fought almost nonstop when they were kids,” Stan said, lips turned up in nostalgia. “They made their Blood Dome debuts within weeks of each other. Cacus nagged

Damien about partnering up for nearly a year before he gave up and found Maera instead.” He sighed. “It was probably a good choice on Damien's part. Neither he nor Cacus have any real subtly to their fighting, and too often the teams without subtly are the teams that fall.” He gestured to the group of necromedics, all dressed in drab gray robes with their faces covered by bone masks, carefully collecting the various pieces of the golem in a large wheelbarrow. “Case in point.”

Once every last bit of gravel had been collected and a fresh layer of sand had been spread to soak up Bastion's blood, the announcer came to life once again. “And now, fiends of all genders, the fight we've been waiting for.” Abby lowered her beer and found herself leaning forward once more as the gate on the far left side of the arena slowly rose. “First up," the announcer went on, "appearing in her eighth death match, she's got questions and you better have some answers if you want to keep your head. I give you... TALIBAH!”

A huge sphinx with golden fur and a dark brown face leapt from the shadows of the entry arch, roaring fiercely as she landed on neat paws. She ran a lap around the arena as the crowd chanted her name, her dark curls bouncing with the energy of her bounds despite the leather helmet that kept them close to her head. In addition to the helmet, she wore a leather breast plate that ran the length of her belly and was buckled to a matching piece of leather strapped to her back. It wouldn't offer much protection against heavy weaponry, but it was pretty clear that Talibah relied on her speed and her agility.

She settled into pacing in the center of the arena, face glued to the opposing entryway. “And her challenger,” the announcer said, “making his fifth death match appearance, he'd set his own mother on fire if he had one, Prince of the Eighth Circle... DAMIEN LAVEY!”

As if to highlight how over-the-top Talibah's entrance had been, Damien marched out of the archway without any theatrics, just the wide, toothy grin of a pyromaniac who had found an unattended gas station to blow up. He was wearing matte black armor — cuirass, pauldrons, vambraces, cuisses, greaves, and what looked like like the helmet from his theater costume (or maybe his theater costume was just a frilled up version of his regular armor?) — and carrying the axe/mace combo he'd told Abby about. He lifted his arm to point the axehead at Talibah, and Abby could just make out him calling, “You ready to dance?”

Abby could already see how this fight would go: Talibah would use her speed to attack fast and often, and Damien would fend her off until he got an opening. For a second, as the bell rung and the two competitors closed on each other, Abby worried that Damien would be an idiot and try to go toe-to-toe(bean) with the sphinx, but he pulled up short and planted his feet when she made her first lunge, catching her body with the axe-mace and throwing her off him. As she scrambled on the sand, Damien lobbed a fireball from his left hand, then another, forcing the sphinx to scamper out of the way or risk severe burns. “He's gonna exhaust himself too fast,” Stan said on Abby's right. “He can't keep tossing fire around like that.”

“He knows his limits,” Lucien said on Stan's other side, but Abby could hear the tense note in his voice.

As if he could hear their ring-side coaching, Damien dropped the fireballs in favor of setting his feet firmly once again, watching Talibah as she prowled in a circle around him. When she came at him the next time, he prepared to block-and-throw again, but at the last second, she twisted to slam into his legs instead of hitting him in the chest. Damien went down, but Talibah hadn't landed well enough to get on top of him and she only managed to kick at him with her back feet before she had to dodge out of the way, mace head crashing into the sand were her spine had recently been. Still, one of his cuisses had taken some damage, long gouges showing where her claws found purchase, and a little blood leaked out. But Damien was still grinning when he got back on his feet, and Abby knew from her own time in the ring with him that the first good hit only served to get his head in the right place to really kick some ass. Talibah started another run at him as he got to his knees, and with a roar, he launched a plume of flame from both hands, hitting the sphinx squarely in the chest and driving her a dozen yards back. She had to rub her head in the sand to put out the tiny fires in her hair, giving Damien enough time to get himself back on his feet and set for her next attack.

Talibah decided to go with the same approach a few more times, clearly trying to wear Damien down until he couldn't push her off anymore, but he looked good — shoulders set firm, feet planted. In fact, if anyone was getting tired, it was the sphinx; Abby could hear how ragged her breathing was becoming, though slightly singed airways might have had something to do with it. The next time Talibah circled him to choose her attack angle, Abby saw Damien's tail, the tip plated with wicked barbs, whip from the left side of his body to the right and she watched with bated breath as Talibah came at him again, fully expecting it when his tail shot forward to wrap her back leg and dig in the flesh with the barbs. The unexpected sensation pulled the sphinx up short, and Damien threw her off again with ease, cause the barb to rip through flesh and sinew with a wild spray of blood.

When Talibah got up this time, she was limping, and Abby was eternally grateful that her round with Damien had been strictly hand-to-hand. “I believe he's got her on the defensive now,” Stan said.

Lucien was less optimistic. “He still needs to be careful. Talibah took out her last three opponents by pinning them. She doesn't have to move that fast to throw her weight around.”

Despite Lucien's misgivings, the whole tenor of the match had changed. Talibah was more cautious and circumspect while Damien stood as tall as before, though blood was now running freely from the wound on his leg. He began to more actively pursue his opponent, not trying to chase her down — that wasn’t feasible even with her injury — but constantly and steadily closing the distance between then so Talibah had to move as well. As she watched, Abby imagined recreating the match from the trails of blood each fighter was leaving behind, mapping out their routes on the sand. 

Talibah seemed to decide that she needed to end the match sooner rather than later and charged full force, letting her full weight slam into Damien even though it meant getting the head of his axe in her ribs. Damien slammed back on the ground beneath her body, arms pinned under her bulk, and when Talibah whipped herself around to get her feet underneath her and swipe her claws at the vulnerable place between helmet and breastplate, the axe-mace was shaken from her side and out of his reach.  
So Damien improvised, slamming his head up to protect his throat and smash his helmet and horns into Talibah’s face at the same time. The sphinx slouched to one side a little, enough for Damien to get his right arm free, but her weight was still holding him to the ground. First he fumbled blindly for his weapon — a mistake that cost him precious seconds while Talibah reoriented herself and went for his throat again, and this time the claws found purchase in red skin and blood sprayed wildly.

“Shit,” Lucien spat. Abby glanced at the lords of Hell for a half second, and Stan was holding Lucien’s hand tightly as he watched with a furrowed brow.

Talibah reared back, ready crash into Damien’s bowels claws first, and Abby wanted to clench her eyes closed so she wouldn’t have to watch her friend get torn apart, but she knew he’d never forgive her for being such a floppy ball sack if she did…

Then a huge fire ball engulfed the sphinx and she screeched in pain as she was blown backward by the blast. Abby blinked furiously in an attempt to relubricate her eyeballs after the heat hit her face, and when she could properly see again, Damien was on his feet, one hand clamped over the wound at his neck and the other dragging the axe-mace along as he zeroed in on where Talibah was writhing in the sand. With one efficient stroke, he smashed her skull, ending her misery and winning the match. As the crowd roared their approval, he hoisted his weapon high and roared with them, like the gaping wound on his neck was a papercut.

“Baphomet’s balls,” Stan breathed out. “I thought he was done.”

Abby was vaguely aware that Lucien was saying something in response, but she couldn’t really hear it. She was too busy wondering how Damien Lavey could look so incredibly hot while possibly bleeding out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have I mentioned how I wish Damien's dads were my dads?


End file.
